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Re: [ITP] unison2.13.16, unison2.17.1


> It is bad design if you need to install 10 version at the same time
> only to be able to access several different servers.  Why don't they
> include support for every know server in the clients?  Shouldn't be
> too hard even recognizing the version of the server during runtime?
> Then I would install always *one* version at a time and as long
> there is no newer server I would be able to access any unison server.

You won't get any argument from me about that.  I agree, it was a bad
design decision.

This problem has been discussed at length on the unison-hackers list;
see the thread beginning at
http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/unison-hackers/2005-June/000118.html
if you want the details.  I pointed out that the version
incompatibility forces me to create a new package for every version,
if I want to enable Cygwin users to synchronize with servers running
any of the recent declared stable and beta releases of Unison.  The
developers acknowledged the problem, and made a partial step to
alleviating it by reorganizing the version numbering.  Now instead of
all versions with different version numbers being incompatible,
versions are compatible iff the first two numbers in their version
string are the same.  This is only a partial improvement, but it's all
we're likely to get for now.

I don't see this problem going away any time soon, because the old
versions will be around for quite a while yet.  Debian stable, for
example, which has just recently been released, includes Unison
2.9.1-- the oldest of the packages currently available in Cygwin.  But
the good news is that those old packages don't require any
maintenance; they just take up space in the package repositories.  And
once Debian stable gets updated, I'll probably declare that no one is
(or should be) running the oldest versions any more, and remove them
from Cygwin.

Andrew.


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