# UNISON NEWS
This file contains a summary of user-visible or important changes, in
the style of the GNU coding standards. By user-visible, we include
changes relevant for those building unison from source.
As of 2022, this file (NEWS.md at top level) is used for news.
Some software has a "changelog" file that records all changes, but
unison uses git history for that, and thus there is no changelog file.
## Changes in 2.52.1
Released 2022-05-08
* Deprecate ocaml < 4.08: 2.53.0 will require 4.08 or higher
* Add man page
* Remove rsh:// URI scheme (ssh:// of course remains).
* Significant bugfixes and minor improvements
* Deprecate "backups" preference (see manual for alternatives)
* Deprecate "stream" and "halfduplex" preferences
## Changes in 2.52.0
Released 2022-03-12
* Feature negotiation, compatible with 2.51.
* New archive format (independent of ocaml version, based on umarshal)
Upgrade is automatic.
* New wire protocol (independent of ocaml version, based on umarshal)
New protocol is used if both sides are >= 2.52.0.
* Compatibility with 2.48
* Support for unix-domain sockets
* Many bugfixes and minor improvements
* ocaml compatibility is now >= 4.01
* NEWS is now in NEWS.md and not in the manual
## Changes in 2.51.5
Released 2021-12-18
* Restore OCaml compat to before 4.02
* dune/opam improvements/fixes
* Improve GTK UI by using GtkTreeView
* Add support for syncing symlinks on Windows (NTFS)
* Improve ssh support on Windows (hide Windows console in GUI mode)
* Many bugfixes and minor improvements
## Changes in 2.51.4
Released 2021-06-24
* OCaml 4.12 support
* fsmonitor improvements and Solaris support
* Color support in text UI, with a new preference, disabled by
NO_COLOR.
* Interactive profile selection in text UI, enabled by a new
preference.
* Working files are stored in the unison directory (typically
/.unison) rather than $HOME.
* Build cleanups, CI improvements, housekeeping
* Many bugfixes and minor improvements
## Changes in 2.51.3
Released 2020-10-21
* Some nontrivial changes to profile parsing (G.raud Meyer)
+ '=' has been considered whitespace until now: several
following chars are considered as only one; trailing chars are
discarded; any non empty sequence of char is splitting. This
is non standard and leads to confusion, for example -ignore==
'Name .*=*' is valid when -ignore='Name .*=*' is not, and
worse -ignore='Name *=' is the same as -ignore='Name *'. The
parser now takes just a single '=' as delimiter after the
option name. Other = characters are considered as part of the
value being assigned to the option.
* Numerous improvements to the text user-interface (G.raud Meyer)
+ New key-commands that restrict the display to a set of
"matching" items: ones that are offering to propagate changes
in a particular direction, conflicts, files to be merged,
etc., plus several more useful key-commands. Type "?" to
Unison to see all available commands.
## Changes in 2.51.0 through 2.51.2
* Repository transplanted from SVN to Git and moved to GitHub ()
(https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison).
* Add a new preference, 'atomic', for specifying directories that
should be treated atomically: if there are changes within such a
directory in both replicase, the whole directory is marked as a
conflict instead of propagating any of the changes. Thanks to
Julian Squires for submitting this patch!
* OSX / macOS
+ Ported to 10.13, High Sierra, and Apple's new APFS (earlier
versions of Unison break because of new behavior of
AppleDouble files)
+ Replaced Growl with OS X native notification center.
* Miscellaneous:
+ The OCaml compiler version is now included in the "connection
header -- the string that's printed when connecting to a
remote server -- to facilitate debugging version mismatch
issues.
+ Compatible with OCaml 4.06.
+ Added a DockerFile for the convenience of Docker users.
+ Many small bugfixes and UI improvements.
## Changes in 2.48
* Incorporated a patch from Christopher Zimmermann to replace the
Uprintf module (which doesn't work with OCaml 4.02, causing Unison
to crash) with equivalent functionality from the standard library.
* Incorporated a refresh of the OSX GUI, contributed by Alan Shutko.
* Added a maxsizethreshold option, which prevents the transfer of
files larger than the size specified (in Kb).
* Added a "copyonconflict" preference, to make a copy of files that
would otherwise be overwritten or deleted in case of conflicting
changes. (This makes it possible to automatically resolve conflicts
in a fairly safe way when synchronizing continuously, in
combination with the "repeat = watch" and "prefer = newer"
preferences.
* File system monitoring:
+ The file watcher now fails when unable to watch a directory,
rather than silently ignoring the issue.
+ File system monitoring: more robust communication with the
helper program (in socket mode, the unison server will still
work properly despite unexpected unison client
disconnections).
+ A bytecode version of unison-fsmonitor is now produced by
"make NATIVE=false"
+ Improved search for unison-fsmonitor
+ Detect when the helper process exits.
+ More robust file watching helper programs for Windows and
Linux. They communicate with Unison through pipes (Unison
redirects stdin and stdout), using a race-free protocol.
+ Retries paths with failures using an exponential backoff
algorithm.
+ The information returned by the file watchers are used
independently for each replica; thus, when only one replica
has changes, Unison will only rescan this replica.
+ When available, used by the graphical UIs to speed up
rescanning (can be disabled by setting the new watch
preference to
+ Small fix to the way fsmonitor.py gets invoked when using the
file watching functionality, suggested by Josh Berdine. Unison
will now look for fsmonitor.py in the same directory where the
Unison executable itself lives.
* Minor:
+ Fixed a bug in export procedure that was messing up
documentation strings.
+ Incorporated a patch from Irányossy Knoblauch Artúr to make
temp file names fit within 143 characters (to make eCryptFS
happy).
+ Added a string to the Conflict direction to document the
reason of the conflict.
+ Log conflicts and problems in the text UI even if nothing is
propagated.
+ Use hash function from OCaml 3.x for comparing archives, even
when compiled with OCaml 4.x.
+ Do not restart Unison in case of uncaught exception when the
repeat preference is set. This seems safer. And it does not
work, for instance, in case of lost connection.
+ Fix Unix.readlink invalid argument error under Windows
+ Fix a crash when the output of the diff program is too large.
+ Fixed Makefile for cross-compiling towards Windows (updated to
MinGW-w64)
## Changes in very old versions
(Note that these are written 'Chagnes since' and thus the content
applies to the release after that.)
Changes since 2.40.63:
* New preference fastercheckUNSAFE, which can be used (with care!) to
achieve much faster update detection when all the common files in
the two replicas are known to be identical. See the manual for more
information.
This feature should still be considered experimental, but it's
ready for other people to try out.
* Added option clientHostName. If specified, it will be used to as
the client host name, overriding UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME and the actual
host name.
* OS X GUI:
+ fix crash under Lion, because of problems with the toolbar,
using the fix suggested in
http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=95778.
+ uimacnew09 is now the standard graphical interface on OSX
+ A small improvement to the uimacnew09 interface from Alan
Schmitt and Steve Kalkwarf: when Unison is run with the -batch
flag, the interface will now automatically propagate changes
and terminate, without waiting for user interaction.
+ Show a modal warning window if there is no archive for the
hosts. The user can then choose to exit or proceed (proceed is
the default). The window is not shown if the batch preference
is true.
+ file details panel selectable
* GTK GUI:
+ New version of uigtk2.ml from Matt Zagrabelny that reorganizes
the icons in a slightly more intuitive way.
* Minor fixes:
+ Setting the prefer preference to older or newer now propagates
deletions when there is no conflict.
+ Correctly quote the path when running merge commands.
+ Add quotes to paths when calling external file watcher
utility.
+ Incorporate a patch to fsmonitor.py (the external filewatcher
utility) from Tomasz Zernicki to make it work better under
Windows.
+ Incorporated new version of fsmonitor.py from Christophe Gohle
+ Fixed incompatibility with OpenSSH 5.6.
+ Fixed fingerprint cache: do not cache file properties
+ Some spelling corrections in documentation and comments from
Stephane Glondu
+ Fixed O_APPEND mode for open under Windows
+ Fixed String.sub invalid argument error when an AppleDouble
file does not contain a finder information field
+ Trim duplicate paths when using "-repeat watch"
+ Unison now passes path arguments and -follow directives to
fsmonitor.py. This seems to work except for one small issue
with how fsmonitor.py treats -follow directives for
directories that don't exist (or maybe this is an issue with
how it treats any kind of monitoring when the thing being
monitored doesn't exist?). If we create a symlink to a
nonexistent directory, give Unison (hence fsmonitor.py) a
'follow' directive for the symlink, start unison, and then
create the directory, fsmonitor.py misses the change.
+ Lines added in profile files by unison always start at a new
line
Changes since 2.40.1:
* Added "BelowPath" patterns, that match a path as well as all paths
below (convenient to use with nodeletion,update,creationpartial
preferences)
* Added a "fat" preference that makes Unison use the right options
when one of the replica is on a FAT filesystem.
* Allow "prefer/force=newer" even when not synchronizing modification
times. (The reconciler will not be aware of the modification time
of unchanged files, so the synchronization choices of Unison can be
different from when "times=true", but the behavior remains sane:
changed files with the most recent modification time will be
propagated.)
* Minor fixes and improvements:
+ Compare filenames up to decomposition in case sensitive mode
when one host is running MacOSX and the unicode preference is
set to true.
+ Rsync: somewhat faster compressor
+ Make Unicode the default on all architectures (it was only the
default when a Mac OS X or Windows machine was involved).
Changes since 2.32:
* Major enhancement: Unicode support.
+ Unison should now handle unicode filenames correctly on all
platforms.
+ This functionality is controlled by a new preference unicode.
+ Unicode mode is now the default when one of the hosts is under
Windows or MacOS. This may make upgrades a bit more painful
(the archives cannot be reused), but this is a much saner
default.
* Partial transfer of directories. If an error occurs while
transferring a directory, the part transferred so far is copied
into place (and the archives are updated accordingly). The
"maxerrors" preference controls how many transfer error Unison will
accept before stopping the transfer of a directory (by default,
only one). This makes it possible to transfer most of a directory
even if there are some errors. Currently, only the first error is
reported by the GUIs.
Also, allow partial transfer of a directory when there was an error
deep inside this directory during update detection. At the moment,
this is only activated with the text and GTK UIs, which have been
modified so that they show that the transfer is going to be partial
and so that they can display all errors.
* Improvement to the code for resuming directory transfers:
+ if a file was not correctly transferred (or the source has
been modified since, with unchanged size), Unison performs a
new transfer rather than failing
+ spurious files are deleted (this can happen if a file is
deleted on the source replica before resuming the transfer;
not deleting the file would result in it reappearing on the
target replica)
* Experimental streaming protocol for transferring file contents (can
be disabled by setting the directive "stream" to false): file
contents is transferred asynchronously (without waiting for a
response from the destination after each chunk sent) rather than
using the synchronous RPC mechanism. As a consequence:
+ Unison now transfers the contents of a single file at a time
(Unison used to transfer several contents simultaneously in
order to hide the connection latency.)
+ the transfer of large files uses the full available bandwidth
and is not slowed done due to the connection latency anymore
+ we get performance improvement for small files as well by
scheduling many files simultaneously (as scheduling a file for
transfer consume little resource: it does not mean allocating
a large buffer anymore)
* Changes to the internal implementation of the rsync algorithm:
+ use longer blocks for large files (the size of a block is the
square root of the size of the file for large files);
+ transmit less checksum information per block (we still have
less than one chance in a hundred million of transferring a
file incorrectly, and Unison will catch any transfer error
when fingerprinting the whole file)
+ avoid transfer overhead (which was 4 bytes per block)
For a 1G file, the first optimization saves a factor 50 on the
amount of data transferred from the target to the source (blocks
are 32768 bytes rather than just 700 bytes). The two other
optimizations save another factor of 2 (from 24 bytes per block
down to 10).
* Implemented an on-disk file fingerprint cache to speed-up update
detection after a crash: this way, Unison does not have do
recompute all the file fingerprints from scratch.
+ When Unison detects that the archive case-sensitivity mode
does not match the current settings, it populates the
fingerprint cache using the archive contents. This way,
changing the case-sensitivity mode should be reasonably fast.
* New preferences "noupdate=root", "nodeletion=root",
"nocreation=root" that prevent Unison from performing files
updates, deletions or creations on the given root. Also 'partial'
versions of 'noupdate', 'nodeletion' and 'nocreation'
* Limit the number of simultaneous external copy program ("copymax"
preference)
* New "links" preference. When set to false, Unison will report an
error on symlinks during update detection. (This is the default
when one host is running Windows but not Cygwin.) This is better
than failing during propagation.
* Added a preference "halfduplex" to force half-duplex communication
with the server. This may be useful on unreliable links (as a more
efficient alternative to "maxthreads = 1").
* Renamed preference "pretendwin" to "ignoreinodenumbers" (an alias
is kept for backwards compatibility).
* Ignore one-second differences when synchronizing modification time.
(Technically, this is an incompatible archive format change, but it
is backward compatible. To trigger a problem, a user would have to
synchronize modification times on a filesystem with a two-second
granularity and then downgrade to a previous version of Unison,
which does not work well in such a case. Thus, it does not seem
worthwhile to increment the archive format number, which would
impact all users.)
* Do not keep many files simultaneously opened anymore when the rsync
algorithm is in use.
* Add "ignorearchives" preference to ignore existing archives (to
avoid forcing users to delete them manually, in situations where
one archive has gotten deleted or corrupted).
* Mac OS
+ fixed rsync bug which could result in an "index out of bounds"
error when transferring resource forks.
+ Fixed bug which made Unison ignore finder information and
resource fork when compiled to 64bit on Mac OSX.
+ should now be 64 bit clean (the Growl framework is not up to
date, though)
+ Made the bridge between Objective C and Ocaml code GC friendly
(it was allocating ML values and putting them in an array
which was not registered with the GC)
+ use darker grey arrows (patch contributed by Eric Y. Kow)
* GTK user interface
+ assistant for creating profiles
+ profile editor
+ pop up a summary window when the replicas are not fully
synchronized after transport
+ display estimated remaining time and transfer rate on the
progress bar
+ allow simultaneous selection of several items
+ Do not reload the preference file before a new update
detection if it is unchanged
+ disabled scrolling to the first unfinished item during
transport. It goes way too fast when lot of small files are
synchronized, and it makes it impossible to browse the file
list during transport.
+ take into account the "height" preference again
+ the internal list of selected reconciler item was not always
in sync with what was displayed (GTK bug?); workaround
implemented
+ Do not display "Looking for change" messages during
propagation (when checking the targe is unchanged) but only
during update detection
+ Apply patch to fix some crashes in the OSX GUI, thanks to Onne
Gorter.
* Text UI
+ During update detection, display status by updating a single
line rather than generating a new line of output every so
often. Should be less confusing.
* Windows
+ Fastcheck is now the default under Windows. People mostly use
NTFS nowadays and the Unicode API provides an equivalent to
inode numbers for this filesystem.
+ Only use long UNC path for accessing replicas (as '..' is not
handled with this format of paths, but can be useful)
+ Windows text UI: now put the console into UTF-8 output mode.
This is the right thing to do when in Unicode mode, and is no
worse than what we had previously otherwise (the console use
some esoteric encoding by default). This only works when using
a Unicode font instead of the default raster font.
+ Don't get the home directory from environment variable HOME
under Windows (except for Cygwin binaries): we don't want the
behavior of Unison to depends on whether it is run from a
Cygwin shell (where HOME is set) or in any other way (where
HOME is usually not set).
* Miscellaneous fixes and improvements
+ Made a server waiting on a socket more resilient to unexpected
lost connections from the client.
+ Small patch to property setting code suggested by Ulrich
Gernkow.
+ Several fixes to the change transfer functions (both the
internal ones and external transfers using rsync). In
particular, limit the number of simultaneous transfer using an
rsync (as the rsync algorithm can use a large amount of memory
when processing huge files)
+ Keep track of which file contents are being transferred, and
delay the transfer of a file when another file with the same
contents is currently being transferred. This way, the second
transfer can be skipped and replaced by a local copy.
+ Experimental update detection optimization: do not read the
contents of unchanged directories
+ When a file transfer fails, turn off fastcheck for this file
on the next sync.
+ Fixed bug with case insensitive mode on a case sensitive
filesystem:
o if file "a/a" is created on one replica and directory "A"
is created on the other, the file failed to be
synchronized the first time Unison is run afterwards, as
Unison uses the wrong path "a/a" (if Unison is run again,
the directories are in the archive, so the right path is
used);
o if file "a" appears on one replica and file "A" appears
on the other with different contents, Unison was unable
to synchronize them.
+ Improved error reporting when the destination is updated
during synchronization: Unison now tells which file has been
updated, and how.
+ Limit the length of temporary file names
+ Case sensitivity information put in the archive (in a backward
compatible way) and checked when the archive is loaded
+ Got rid of the 16mb marshalling limit by marshalling to a
bigarray.
+ Resume copy of partially transferred files.
Changes since 2.31:
* Small user interface changes
+ Small change to text UI "scanning..." messages, to print just
directories (hopefully making it clearer that individual files
are not necessarily being fingerprinted).
* Minor fixes and improvements:
+ Ignore one hour differences when deciding whether a file may
have been updated. This avoids slow update detection after
daylight saving time changes under Windows. This makes Unison
slightly more likely to miss an update, but it should be safe
enough.
+ Fix a small bug that was affecting mainly windows users. We
need to commit the archives at the end of the sync even if
there are no updates to propagate because some files (in fact,
if we've just switched to DST on windows, a LOT of files)
might have new modtimes in the archive. (Changed the text UI
only. It's less clear where to change the GUI.)
+ Don't delete the temp file when a transfer fails due to a
fingerprint mismatch (so that we can have a look and see why!)
We've also added more debugging code togive more informative
error messages when we encounter the dreaded and longstanding
"assert failed during file transfer" bug
+ Incorrect paths ("path" directive) now result in an error
update item rather than a fatal error.
+ Create parent directories (with correct permissions) during
transport for paths which point to non-existent locations in
the destination replica.
Changes since 2.27:
* If Unison is interrupted during a directory transfer, it will now
leave the partially transferred directory intact in a temporary
location. (This maintains the invariant that new files/directories
are transferred either completely or not at all.) The next time
Unison is run, it will continue filling in this temporary
directory, skipping transferring files that it finds are already
there.
* We've added experimental support for invoking an external file
transfer tool for whole-file copies instead of Unison's built-in
transfer protocol. Three new preferences have been added:
+ copyprog is a string giving the name (and command-line
switches, if needed) of an external program that can be used
to copy large files efficiently. By default, rsync is invoked,
but other tools such as scp can be used instead by changing
the value of this preference. (Although this is not its
primary purpose, rsync is actually a pretty fast way of
copying files that don't already exist on the receiving host.)
For files that do already exist on (but that have been changed
in one replica), Unison will always use its built-in
implementation of the rsync algorithm.
+ Added a "copyprogrest" preference, so that we can give
different command lines for invoking the external copy utility
depending on whether a partially transferred file already
exists or not. (Rsync doesn't seem to care about this, but
other utilities may.)
+ copythreshold is an integer (-1 by default), indicating above
what filesize (in megabytes) Unison should use the external
copying utility specified by copyprog. Specifying 0 will cause
ALL copies to use the external program; a negative number will
prevent any files from using it. (Default is -1.)
Thanks to Alan Schmitt for a huge amount of hacking and to an
anonymous sponsor for suggesting and underwriting this extension.
* Small improvements:
+ Added a new preference, dontchmod. By default, Unison uses the
chmod system call to set the permission bits of files after it
has copied them. But in some circumstances (and under some
operating systems), the chmod call always fails. Setting this
preference completely prevents Unison from ever calling chmod.
+ Don't ignore files that look like backup files if the
backuplocation preference is set to central
+ Shortened the names of several preferences. The old names are
also still supported, for backwards compatibility, but they do
not appear in the documentation.
+ Lots of little documentation tidying. (In particular,
preferences are separated into Basic and Advanced! This should
hopefully make Unison a little more approachable for new
users.
+ Unison can sometimes fail to transfer a file, giving the
unhelpful message "Destination updated during synchronization"
even though the file has not been changed. This can be caused
by programs that change either the file's contents or the
file's extended attributes without changing its modification
time. It's not clear what is the best fix for this - it is not
Unison's fault, but it makes Unison's behavior puzzling - but
at least Unison can be more helpful about suggesting a
workaround (running once with fastcheck set to false). The
failure message has been changed to give this advice.
+ Further improvements to the OS X GUI (thanks to Alan Schmitt
and Craig Federighi).
* Very preliminary support for triggering Unison from an external
filesystem-watching utility. The current implementation is very
simple, not efficient, and almost completely untested--not ready
for real users. But if someone wants to help improve it (e.g., by
writing a filesystem watcher for your favorite OS), please make
yourself known!
On the Unison side, the new behavior is very simple:
+ use the text UI
+ start Unison with the command-line flag "-repeat FOO", where
FOO is name of a file where Unison should look for
notifications of changes
+ when it starts up, Unison will read the whole contents of this
file (on both hosts), which should be a newline-separated list
of paths (relative to the root of the synchronization) and
synchronize just these paths, as if it had been started with
the "-path=xxx" option for each one of them
+ when it finishes, it will sleep for a few seconds and then
examine the watchfile again; if anything has been added, it
will read the new paths, synchronize them, and go back to
sleep
+ that's it!
To use this to drive Unison "incrementally," just start it in this
mode and start up a tool (on each host) to watch for new changes to
the filesystem and append the appropriate paths to the watchfile.
Hopefully such tools should not be too hard to write.
* Bug fixes:
+ Fixed a bug that was causing new files to be created with
permissions 0x600 instead of using a reasonable default (like
0x644), if the 'perms' flag was set to 0. (Bug reported by Ben
Crowell.)
+ Follow maxthreads preference when transferring directories.
Changes since 2.17:
* Major rewrite and cleanup of the whole Mac OS X graphical user
interface by Craig Federighi. Thanks, Craig!!!
* Small fix to ctime (non-)handling in update detection under windows
with fastcheck.
* Several small fixes to the GTK2 UI to make it work better under
Windows [thanks to Karl M for these].
* The backup functionality has been completely rewritten. The
external interface has not changed, but numerous bugs, irregular
behaviors, and cross-platform inconsistencies have been corrected.
* The Unison project now accepts donations via PayPal. If you'd like
to donate, you can find a link to the donation page on the Unison
home page (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/ bcpierce/unison/lists.html).
* Some important safety improvements:
+ Added a new mountpoint preference, which can be used to
specify a path that must exist in both replicas at the end of
update detection (otherwise Unison aborts). This can be used
to avoid potentially dangerous situations when Unison is used
with removable media such as external hard drives and compact
flash cards.
+ The confirmation of "big deletes" is now controlled by a
boolean preference confirmbigdeletes. Default is true, which
gives the same behavior as previously. (This functionality is
at least partly superseded by the mountpoint preference, but
it has been left in place in case it is useful to some
people.)
+ If Unison is asked to "follow" a symbolic link but there is
nothing at the other end of the link, it will now flag this
path as an error, rather than treating the symlink itself as
missing or deleted. This avoids a potentially dangerous
situation where a followed symlink points to an external
filesystem that might be offline when Unison is run (whereupon
Unison would cheerfully delete the corresponding files in the
other replica!).
* Smaller changes:
+ Added forcepartial and preferpartial preferences, which behave
like force and prefer but can be specified on a per-path
basis. [Thanks to Alan Schmitt for this.]
+ A bare-bones self test feature was added, which runs unison
through some of its paces and checks that the results are as
expected. The coverage of the tests is still very limited, but
the facility has already been very useful in debugging the new
backup functionality (especially in exposing some subtle
cross-platform issues).
+ Refined debugging code so that the verbosity of individual
modules can be controlled separately. Instead of just putting
'-debug verbose' on the command line, you can put '-debug
update+', which causes all the extra messages in the Update
module, but not other modules, to be printed. Putting '-debug
verbose' causes all modules to print with maximum verbosity.
+ Removed mergebatch preference. (It never seemed very useful,
and its semantics were confusing.)
+ Rewrote some of the merging functionality, for better
cooperation with external Harmony instances.
+ Changed the temp file prefix from .# to .unison.
+ Compressed the output from the text user interface
(particularly when run with the -terse flag) to make it easier
to interpret the results when Unison is run several times in
succession from a script.
+ Diff and merge functions now work under Windows.
+ Changed the order of arguments to the default diff command (so
that the + and - annotations in diff's output are reversed).
+ Added .mpp files to the "never fastcheck" list (like .xls
files).
* Many small bugfixes, including:
+ Fixed a longstanding bug regarding fastcheck and daylight
saving time under Windows when Unison is set up to synchronize
modification times. (Modification times cannot be updated in
the archive in this case, so we have to ignore one hour
differences.)
+ Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the archives to be
left in non-identical states on the two hosts after
synchronization.
+ Fixed a bug that prevented Unison from communicating correctly
between 32- and 64-bit architectures.
+ On windows, file creation times are no longer used as a proxy
for inode numbers. (This is unfortunate, as it makes fastcheck
a little less safe. But it turns out that file creation times
are not reliable under Windows: if a file is removed and a new
file is created in its place, the new one will sometimes be
given the same creation date as the old one!)
+ Set read-only file to R/W on OSX before attempting to change
other attributes.
+ Fixed bug resulting in spurious "Aborted" errors during
transport (thanks to Jerome Vouillon)
+ Enable diff if file contents have changed in one replica, but
only properties in the other.
+ Removed misleading documentation for 'repeat' preference.
+ Fixed a bug in merging code where Unison could sometimes
deadlock with the external merge program, if the latter
produced large amounts of output.
+ Workaround for a bug compiling gtk2 user interface against
current versions of gtk2+ libraries.
+ Added a better error message for "ambiguous paths".
+ Squashed a longstanding bug that would cause file transfer to
fail with the message "Failed: Error in readWrite: Is a
directory."
+ Replaced symlinks with copies of their targets in the Growl
framework in src/uimac. This should make the sources easier to
check out from the svn repository on WinXP systems.
+ Added a workaround (suggested by Karl M.) for the problem
discussed on the unison users mailing list where, on the
Windows platform, the server would hang when transferring
files. I conjecture that the problem has to do with the RPC
mechanism, which was used to make a call back from the server
to the client (inside the Trace.log function) so that the log
message would be appended to the log file on the client. The
workaround is to dump these messages (about when xferbycopying
shortcuts are applied and whether they succeed) just to the
standard output of the Unison process, not to the log file.
Changes since 2.13.0:
* The features for performing backups and for invoking external merge
programs have been completely rewritten by Stephane Lescuyer
(thanks, Stephane!). The user-visible functionality should not
change, but the internals have been rationalized and there are a
number of new features. See the manual (in particular, the
description of the backupXXX preferences) for details.
* Incorporated patches for ipv6 support, contributed by Samuel
Thibault. (Note that, due to a bug in the released OCaml 3.08.3
compiler, this code will not actually work with ipv6 unless
compiled with the CVS version of the OCaml compiler, where the bug
has been fixed; however, ipv4 should continue to work normally.)
* OSX interface:
+ Incorporated Ben Willmore's cool new icon for the Mac UI.
* Small fixes:
+ Fixed off by one error in month numbers (in printed dates)
reported by Bob Burger
Changes since 2.12.0:
* New convention for release numbering: Releases will continue to be
given numbers of the form X.Y.Z, but, from now on, just the major
version number (X.Y) will be considered significant when checking
compatibility between client and server versions. The third
component of the version number will be used only to identify
"patch levels" of releases.
This change goes hand in hand with a change to the procedure for
making new releases. Candidate releases will initially be given
"beta release" status when they are announced for public
consumption. Any bugs that are discovered will be fixed in a
separate branch of the source repository (without changing the
major version number) and new tarballs re-released as needed. When
this process converges, the patched beta version will be dubbed
stable.
* Warning (failure in batch mode) when one path is completely
emptied. This prevents Unison from deleting everything on one
replica when the other disappear.
* Fix diff bug (where no difference is shown the first time the diff
command is given).
* User interface changes:
+ Improved workaround for button focus problem (GTK2 UI)
+ Put leading zeroes in date fields
+ More robust handling of character encodings in GTK2 UI
+ Changed format of modification time displays, from modified at
hh:mm:ss on dd MMM, yyyy to modified on yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss
+ Changed time display to include seconds (so that people on FAT
filesystems will not be confused when Unison tries to update a
file time to an odd number of seconds and the filesystem
truncates it to an even number!)
+ Use the diff "-u" option by default when showing differences
between files (the output is more readable)
+ In text mode, pipe the diff output to a pager if the
environment variable PAGER is set
+ Bug fixes and cleanups in ssh password prompting. Now works
with the GTK2 UI under Linux. (Hopefully the Mac OS X one is
not broken!)
+ Include profile name in the GTK2 window name
+ Added bindings ',' (same as '<') and '.' (same as '>') in the
GTK2 UI
* Mac GUI:
+ actions like < and > scroll to the next item as necessary.
+ Restart has a menu item and keyboard shortcut (command-R).
+ Added a command-line tool for Mac OS X. It can be installed
from the Unison menu.
+ New icon.
+ Handle the "help" command-line argument properly.
+ Handle profiles given on the command line properly.
+ When a profile has been selected, the profile dialog is
replaced by a "connecting" message while the connection is
being made. This gives better feedback.
+ Size of left and right columns is now large enough so that
"PropsChanged" is not cut off.
* Minor changes:
+ Disable multi-threading when both roots are local
+ Improved error handling code. In particular, make sure all
files are closed in case of a transient failure
+ Under Windows, use $UNISON for home directory as a last resort
(it was wrongly moved before $HOME and $USERPROFILE in Unison
2.12.0)
+ Reopen the logfile if its name changes (profile change)
+ Double-check that permissions and modification times have been
properly set: there are some combination of OS and filesystem
on which setting them can fail in a silent way.
+ Check for bad Windows filenames for pure Windows
synchronization also (not just cross architecture
synchronization). This way, filenames containing backslashes,
which are not correctly handled by unison, are rejected right
away.
+ Attempt to resolve issues with synchronizing modification
times of read-only files under Windows
+ Ignore chmod failures when deleting files
+ Ignore trailing dots in filenames in case insensitive mode
+ Proper quoting of paths, files and extensions ignored using
the UI
+ The strings CURRENT1 and CURRENT2 are now correctly substitued
when they occur in the diff preference
+ Improvements to syncing resource forks between Macs via a
non-Mac system.
Changes since 2.10.2:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed.
* Source code availability: The Unison sources are now managed using
Subversion. One nice side-effect is that anonymous checkout is now
possible, like this:
svn co https://cvs.cis.upenn.edu:3690/svnroot/unison/
We will also continue to export a "developer tarball" of the
current (modulo one day) sources in the web export directory. To
receive commit logs for changes to the sources, subscribe to the
unison-hackers list (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/
bcpierce/unison/lists.html).
* Text user interface:
+ Substantial reworking of the internal logic of the text UI to
make it a bit easier to modify.
+ The dumbtty flag in the text UI is automatically set to true
if the client is running on a Unix system and the EMACS
environment variable is set to anything other than the empty
string.
* Native OS X gui:
+ Added a synchronize menu item with keyboard shortcut
+ Added a merge menu item, still needs to be debugged
+ Fixes to compile for Panther
+ Miscellaneous improvements and bugfixes
* Small changes:
+ Changed the filename checking code to apply to Windows only,
instead of OS X as well.
+ Finder flags now synchronized
+ Fallback in copy.ml for filesystem that do not support O_EXCL
+ Changed buffer size for local file copy (was highly
inefficient with synchronous writes)
+ Ignore chmod failure when deleting a directory
+ Fixed assertion failure when resolving a conflict content
change / permission changes in favor of the content change.
+ Workaround for transferring large files using rsync.
+ Use buffered I/O for files (this is the only way to open files
in binary mode under Cygwin).
+ On non-Cygwin Windows systems, the UNISON environment variable
is now checked first to determine where to look for Unison's
archive and preference files, followed by HOME and USERPROFILE
in that order. On Unix and Cygwin systems, HOME is used.
+ Generalized diff preference so that it can be given either as
just the command name to be used for calculating diffs or else
a whole command line, containing the strings CURRENT1 and
CURRENT2, which will be replaced by the names of the files to
be diff'ed before the command is called.
+ Recognize password prompts in some newer versions of ssh.
Changes since 2.9.20:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed.
* Major functionality changes:
+ Major tidying and enhancement of 'merge' functionality. The
main user-visible change is that the external merge program
may either write the merged output to a single new file, as
before, or it may modify one or both of its input files, or it
may write two new files. In the latter cases, its
modifications will be copied back into place on both the local
and the remote host, and (if the two files are now equal) the
archive will be updated appropriately. More information can be
found in the user manual. Thanks to Malo Denielou and Alan
Schmitt for these improvements.
Warning: the new merging functionality is not completely
compatible with old versions! Check the manual for details.
+ Files larger than 2Gb are now supported.
+ Added preliminary (and still somewhat experimental) support
for the Apple OS X operating system.
o Resource forks should be transferred correctly. (See the
manual for details of how this works when synchronizing
HFS with non-HFS volumes.) Synchronization of file type
and creator information is also supported.
o On OSX systems, the name of the directory for storing
Unison's archives, preference files, etc., is now
determined as follows:
# if ~/.unison exists, use it
# otherwise, use ~/Library/Application Support/Unison,
creating it if necessary.
o A preliminary native-Cocoa user interface is under
construction. This still needs some work, and some users
experience unpredictable crashes, so it is only for
hackers for now. Run make with UISTYLE=mac to build this
interface.
* Minor functionality changes:
+ Added an ignorelocks preference, which forces Unison to
override left-over archive locks. (Setting this preference is
dangerous! Use it only if you are positive you know what you
are doing.)
+ Added a new preference assumeContentsAreImmutable. If a
directory matches one of the patterns set in this preference,
then update detection is skipped for files in this directory.
(The purpose is to speed update detection for cases like Mail
folders, which contain lots and lots of immutable files.) Also
a preference assumeContentsAreImmutableNot, which overrides
the first, similarly to ignorenot. (Later amendment: these
preferences are now called immutable and immutablenot.)
+ The ignorecase flag has been changed from a boolean to a
three-valued preference. The default setting, called default,
checks the operating systems running on the client and server
and ignores filename case if either of them is OSX or Windows.
Setting ignorecase to true or false overrides this behavior.
If you have been setting ignorecase on the command line using
-ignorecase=true or -ignorecase=false, you will need to change
to -ignorecase true or -ignorecase false.
+ a new preference, 'repeat', for the text user interface
(only). If 'repeat' is set to a number, then, after it
finishes synchronizing, Unison will wait for that many seconds
and then start over, continuing this way until it is killed
from outside. Setting repeat to true will automatically set
the batch preference to true.
+ Excel files are now handled specially, so that the fastcheck
optimization is skipped even if the fastcheck flag is set.
(Excel does some naughty things with modtimes, making this
optimization unreliable and leading to failures during change
propagation.)
+ The ignorecase flag has been changed from a boolean to a
three-valued preference. The default setting, called
'default', checks the operating systems running on the client
and server and ignores filename case if either of them is OSX
or Windows. Setting ignorecase to 'true' or 'false' overrides
this behavior.
+ Added a new preference, 'repeat', for the text user interface
(only, at the moment). If 'repeat' is set to a number, then,
after it finishes synchronizing, Unison will wait for that
many seconds and then start over, continuing this way until it
is killed from outside. Setting repeat to true will
automatically set the batch preference to true.
+ The 'rshargs' preference has been split into 'rshargs' and
'sshargs' (mainly to make the documentation clearer). In fact,
'rshargs' is no longer mentioned in the documentation at all,
since pretty much everybody uses ssh now anyway.
* Documentation
+ The web pages have been completely redesigned and reorganized.
(Thanks to Alan Schmitt for help with this.)
* User interface improvements
+ Added a GTK2 user interface, capable (among other things) of
displaying filenames in any locale encoding. Kudos to Stephen
Tse for contributing this code!
+ The text UI now prints a list of failed and skipped transfers
at the end of synchronization.
+ Restarting update detection from the graphical UI will reload
the current profile (which in particular will reset the -path
preference, in case it has been narrowed by using the "Recheck
unsynchronized items" command).
+ Several small improvements to the text user interface,
including a progress display.
* Bug fixes (too numerous to count, actually, but here are some):
+ The maxthreads preference works now.
+ Fixed bug where warning message about uname returning an
unrecognized result was preventing connection to server. (The
warning is no longer printed, and all systems where 'uname'
returns anything other than 'Darwin' are assumed not to be
running OS X.)
+ Fixed a problem on OS X that caused some valid file names
(e.g., those including colons) to be considered invalid.
+ Patched Path.followLink to follow links under cygwin in
addition to Unix (suggested by Matt Swift).
+ Small change to the storeRootsName function, suggested by
bliviero at ichips.intel.com, to fix a problem in unison with
the `rootalias' option, which allows you to tell unison that
two roots contain the same files. Rootalias was being applied
after the hosts were sorted, so it wouldn't work properly in
all cases.
+ Incorporated a fix by Dmitry Bely for setting utimes of
read-only files on Win32 systems.
* Installation / portability:
+ Unison now compiles with OCaml version 3.07 and later out of
the box.
+ Makefile.OCaml fixed to compile out of the box under OpenBSD.
+ a few additional ports (e.g. OpenBSD, Zaurus/IPAQ) are now
mentioned in the documentation
+ Unison can now be installed easily on OSX systems using the
Fink package manager
Changes since 2.9.1:
* Added a preference maxthreads that can be used to limit the number
of simultaneous file transfers.
* Added a backupdir preference, which controls where backup files are
stored.
* Basic support added for OSX. In particular, Unison now recognizes
when one of the hosts being synchronized is running OSX and
switches to a case-insensitive treatment of filenames (i.e., 'foo'
and 'FOO' are considered to be the same file). (OSX is not yet
fully working, however: in particular, files with resource forks
will not be synchronized correctly.)
* The same hash used to form the archive name is now also added to
the names of the temp files created during file transfer. The
reason for this is that, during update detection, we are going to
silently delete any old temp files that we find along the way, and
we want to prevent ourselves from deleting temp files belonging to
other instances of Unison that may be running in parallel, e.g.
synchronizing with a different host. Thanks to Ruslan Ermilov for
this suggestion.
* Several small user interface improvements
* Documentation
+ FAQ and bug reporting instructions have been split out as
separate HTML pages, accessible directly from the unison web
page.
+ Additions to FAQ, in particular suggestions about performance
tuning.
* Makefile
+ Makefile.OCaml now sets UISTYLE=text or UISTYLE=gtk
automatically, depending on whether it finds lablgtk installed
+ Unison should now compile "out of the box" under OSX
Changes since 2.8.1:
* Changing profile works again under Windows
* File movement optimization: Unison now tries to use local copy
instead of transfer for moved or copied files. It is controlled by
a boolean option "xferbycopying".
* Network statistics window (transfer rate, amount of data
transferred). [NB: not available in Windows-Cygwin version.]
* symlinks work under the cygwin version (which is dynamically
linked).
* Fixed potential deadlock when synchronizing between Windows and
Unix
* Small improvements:
+ If neither the USERPROFILE nor the HOME environment variables
are set, then Unison will put its temporary commit log (called
DANGER.README) into the directory named by the UNISON
environment variable, if any; otherwise it will use C:.
+ alternative set of values for fastcheck: yes = true; no =
false; default = auto.
+ -silent implies -contactquietly
* Source code:
+ Code reorganization and tidying. (Started breaking up some of
the basic utility modules so that the non-unison-specific
stuff can be made available for other projects.)
+ several Makefile and docs changes (for release);
+ further comments in "update.ml";
+ connection information is not stored in global variables
anymore.
Changes since 2.7.78:
* Small bugfix to textual user interface under Unix (to avoid leaving
the terminal in a bad state where it would not echo inputs after
Unison exited).
Changes since 2.7.39:
* Improvements to the main web page (stable and beta version docs are
now both accessible).
* User manual revised.
* Added some new preferences:
+ "sshcmd" and "rshcmd" for specifying paths to ssh and rsh
programs.
+ "contactquietly" for suppressing the "contacting server"
message during Unison startup (under the graphical UI).
* Bug fixes:
+ Fixed small bug in UI that neglected to change the displayed
column headers if loading a new profile caused the roots to
change.
+ Fixed a bug that would put the text UI into an infinite loop
if it encountered a conflict when run in batch mode.
+ Added some code to try to fix the display of non-Ascii
characters in filenames on Windows systems in the GTK UI.
(This code is currently untested--if you're one of the people
that had reported problems with display of non-ascii
filenames, we'd appreciate knowing if this actually fixes
things.)
+ `-prefer/-force newer' works properly now. (The bug was
reported by Sebastian Urbaniak and Sean Fulton.)
* User interface and Unison behavior:
+ Renamed `Proceed' to `Go' in the graphical UI.
+ Added exit status for the textual user interface.
+ Paths that are not synchronized because of conflicts or errors
during update detection are now noted in the log file.
+ [END] messages in log now use a briefer format
+ Changed the text UI startup sequence so that ./unison -ui text
will use the default profile instead of failing.
+ Made some improvements to the error messages.
+ Added some debugging messages to remote.ml.
Changes since 2.7.7:
* Incorporated, once again, a multi-threaded transport sub-system. It
transfers several files at the same time, thereby making much more
effective use of available network bandwidth. Unlike the earlier
attempt, this time we do not rely on the native thread library of
OCaml. Instead, we implement a light-weight, non-preemptive
multi-thread library in OCaml directly. This version appears
stable.
Some adjustments to unison are made to accommodate the
multi-threaded version. These include, in particular, changes to
the user interface and logging, for example:
+ Two log entries for each transferring task, one for the
beginning, one for the end.
+ Suppressed warning messages against removing temp files left
by a previous unison run, because warning does not work nicely
under multi-threading. The temp file names are made less
likely to coincide with the name of a file created by the
user. They take the form
.#<filename>.<serial>.unison.tmp. [N.b. This was later changed
to .unison.<filename>.<serial>.unison.tmp.]
* Added a new command to the GTK user interface: pressing 'f' causes
Unison to start a new update detection phase, using as paths just
those paths that have been detected as changed and not yet marked
as successfully completed. Use this command to quickly restart
Unison on just the set of paths still needing attention after a
previous run.
* Made the ignorecase preference user-visible, and changed the
initialization code so that it can be manually set to true, even if
neither host is running Windows. (This may be useful, e.g., when
using Unison running on a Unix system with a FAT volume mounted.)
* Small improvements and bug fixes:
+ Errors in preference files now generate fatal errors rather
than warnings at startup time. (I.e., you can't go on from
them.) Also, we fixed a bug that was preventing these warnings
from appearing in the text UI, so some users who have been
running (unsuspectingly) with garbage in their prefs files may
now get error reports.
+ Error reporting for preference files now provides file name
and line number.
+ More intelligible message in the case of identical change to
the same files: "Nothing to do: replicas have been changed
only in identical ways since last sync."
+ Files with prefix '.#' excluded when scanning for preference
files.
+ Rsync instructions are send directly instead of first
marshaled.
+ Won't try forever to get the fingerprint of a continuously
changing file: unison will give up after certain number of
retries.
+ Other bug fixes, including the one reported by Peter Selinger
(force=older preference not working).
* Compilation:
+ Upgraded to the new OCaml 3.04 compiler, with the LablGtk
1.2.3 library (patched version used for compiling under
Windows).
+ Added the option to compile unison on the Windows platform
with Cygwin GNU C compiler. This option only supports building
dynamically linked unison executables.
Changes since 2.7.4:
* Fixed a silly (but debilitating) bug in the client startup
sequence.
Changes since 2.7.1:
* Added addprefsto preference, which (when set) controls which
preference file new preferences (e.g. new ignore patterns) are
added to.
* Bug fix: read the initial connection header one byte at a time, so
that we don't block if the header is shorter than expected. (This
bug did not affect normal operation -- it just made it hard to tell
when you were trying to use Unison incorrectly with an old version
of the server, since it would hang instead of giving an error
message.)
Changes since 2.6.59:
* Changed fastcheck from a boolean to a string preference. Its legal
values are yes (for a fast check), no (for a safe check), or
default (for a fast check--which also happens to be safe--when
running on Unix and a safe check when on Windows). The default is
default.
* Several preferences have been renamed for consistency. All
preference names are now spelled out in lowercase. For backward
compatibility, the old names still work, but they are not mentioned
in the manual any more.
* The temp files created by the 'diff' and 'merge' commands are now
named by prepending a new prefix to the file name, rather than
appending a suffix. This should avoid confusing diff/merge programs
that depend on the suffix to guess the type of the file contents.
* We now set the keepalive option on the server socket, to make sure
that the server times out if the communication link is unexpectedly
broken.
* Bug fixes:
+ When updating small files, Unison now closes the destination
file.
+ File permissions are properly updated when the file is behind
a followed link.
+ Several other small fixes.
Changes since 2.6.38:
* Major Windows performance improvement!
We've added a preference fastcheck that makes Unison look only at a
file's creation time and last-modified time to check whether it has
changed. This should result in a huge speedup when checking for
updates in large replicas.
When this switch is set, Unison will use file creation times as
'pseudo inode numbers' when scanning Windows replicas for updates,
instead of reading the full contents of every file. This may cause
Unison to miss propagating an update if the create time,
modification time, and length of the file are all unchanged by the
update (this is not easy to achieve, but it can be done). However,
Unison will never overwrite such an update with a change from the
other replica, since it always does a safe check for updates just
before propagating a change. Thus, it is reasonable to use this
switch most of the time and occasionally run Unison once with
fastcheck set to false, if you are worried that Unison may have
overlooked an update.
Warning: This change is has not yet been thoroughly field-tested.
If you set the fastcheck preference, pay careful attention to what
Unison is doing.
* New functionality: centralized backups and merging
+ This version incorporates two pieces of major new
functionality, implemented by Sylvain Roy during a summer
internship at Penn: a centralized backup facility that keeps a
full backup of (selected files in) each replica, and a merging
feature that allows Unison to invoke an external file-merging
tool to resolve conflicting changes to individual files.
+ Centralized backups:
o Unison now maintains full backups of the
last-synchronized versions of (some of) the files in each
replica; these function both as backups in the usual
sense and as the "common version" when invoking external
merge programs.
o The backed up files are stored in a directory
/.unison/backup on each host. (The name of this directory
can be changed by setting the environment variable
UNISONBACKUPDIR.)
o The predicate backup controls which files are actually
backed up: giving the preference 'backup = Path *' causes
backing up of all files.
o Files are added to the backup directory whenever unison
updates its archive. This means that
# When unison reconstructs its archive from scratch
(e.g., because of an upgrade, or because the archive
files have been manually deleted), all files will be
backed up.
# Otherwise, each file will be backed up the first
time unison propagates an update for it.
o The preference backupversions controls how many previous
versions of each file are kept. The default is 2 (i.e.,
the last synchronized version plus one backup).
o For backward compatibility, the backups preference is
also still supported, but backup is now preferred.
o It is OK to manually delete files from the backup
directory (or to throw away the directory itself). Before
unison uses any of these files for anything important, it
checks that its fingerprint matches the one that it
expects.
+ Merging:
o Both user interfaces offer a new 'merge' command, invoked
by pressing 'm' (with a changed file selected).
o The actual merging is performed by an external program.
The preferences merge and merge2 control how this program
is invoked. If a backup exists for this file (see the
backup preference), then the merge preference is used for
this purpose; otherwise merge2 is used. In both cases,
the value of the preference should be a string
representing the command that should be passed to a shell
to invoke the merge program. Within this string, the
special substrings CURRENT1, CURRENT2, NEW, and OLD may
appear at any point. Unison will substitute these as
follows before invoking the command:
# CURRENT1 is replaced by the name of the local copy
of the file;
# CURRENT2 is replaced by the name of a temporary
file, into which the contents of the remote copy of
the file have been transferred by Unison prior to
performing the merge;
# NEW is replaced by the name of a temporary file that
Unison expects to be written by the merge program
when it finishes, giving the desired new contents of
the file; and
# OLD is replaced by the name of the backed up copy of
the original version of the file (i.e., its state at
the end of the last successful run of Unison), if
one exists (applies only to merge, not merge2).
For example, on Unix systems setting the merge preference
to
merge = diff3 -m CURRENT1 OLD CURRENT2 > NEW
will tell Unison to use the external diff3 program for
merging.
A large number of external merging programs are
available. For example, emacs users may find the
following convenient:
merge2 = emacs -q --eval '(ediff-merge-files "CURRENT1" "CURRENT2"
nil "NEW")'
merge = emacs -q --eval '(ediff-merge-files-with-ancestor
"CURRENT1" "CURRENT2" "OLD" nil "NEW")'
(These commands are displayed here on two lines to avoid
running off the edge of the page. In your preference
file, each should be written on a single line.)
o If the external program exits without leaving any file at
the path NEW, Unison considers the merge to have failed.
If the merge program writes a file called NEW but exits
with a non-zero status code, then Unison considers the
merge to have succeeded but to have generated conflicts.
In this case, it attempts to invoke an external editor so
that the user can resolve the conflicts. The value of the
editor preference controls what editor is invoked by
Unison. The default is emacs.
o Please send us suggestions for other useful values of the
merge2 and merge preferences - we'd like to give several
examples in the manual.
* Smaller changes:
+ When one preference file includes another, unison no longer
adds the suffix '.prf' to the included file by default. If a
file with precisely the given name exists in the .unison
directory, it will be used; otherwise Unison will add .prf, as
it did before. (This change means that included preference
files can be named blah.include instead of blah.prf, so that
unison will not offer them in its 'choose a preference file'
dialog.)
+ For Linux systems, we now offer both a statically linked and a
dynamically linked executable. The static one is larger, but
will probably run on more systems, since it doesn't depend on
the same versions of dynamically linked library modules being
available.
+ Fixed the force and prefer preferences, which were getting the
propagation direction exactly backwards.
+ Fixed a bug in the startup code that would cause unison to
crash when the default profile (~/.unison/default.prf) does
not exist.
+ Fixed a bug where, on the run when a profile is first created,
Unison would confusingly display the roots in reverse order in
the user interface.
* For developers:
+ We've added a module dependency diagram to the source
distribution, in src/DEPENDENCIES.ps, to help new prospective
developers with navigating the code.
Changes since 2.6.11:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed.
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: The startup sequence has been completely
rewritten and greatly simplified. The main user-visible change is
that the defaultpath preference has been removed. Its effect can be
approximated by using multiple profiles, with include directives to
incorporate common settings. All uses of defaultpath in existing
profiles should be changed to path.
Another change in startup behavior that will affect some users is
that it is no longer possible to specify roots both in the profile
and on the command line.
You can achieve a similar effect, though, by breaking your profile
into two:
default.prf =
root = blah
root = foo
include common
common.prf =
<everything else>
Now do
unison common root1 root2
when you want to specify roots explicitly.
* The -prefer and -force options have been extended to allow users to
specify that files with more recent modtimes should be propagated,
writing either -prefer newer or -force newer. (For symmetry, Unison
will also accept -prefer older or -force older.) The -force
older/newer options can only be used when -times is also set.
The graphical user interface provides access to these facilities on
a one-off basis via the Actions menu.
* Names of roots can now be "aliased" to allow replicas to be
relocated without changing the name of the archive file where
Unison stores information between runs. (This feature is for
experts only. See the "Archive Files" section of the manual for
more information.)
* Graphical user-interface:
+ A new command is provided in the Synchronization menu for
switching to a new profile without restarting Unison from
scratch.
+ The GUI also supports one-key shortcuts for commonly used
profiles. If a profile contains a preference of the form 'key
= n', where n is a single digit, then pressing this key will
cause Unison to immediately switch to this profile and begin
synchronization again from scratch. (Any actions that may have
been selected for a set of changes currently being displayed
will be discarded.)
+ Each profile may include a preference 'label = <string>'
giving a descriptive string that described the options
selected in this profile. The string is listed along with the
profile name in the profile selection dialog, and displayed in
the top-right corner of the main Unison window.
* Minor:
+ Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause the 'diff' display to
order the files backwards relative to the main user interface.
(Thanks to Pascal Brisset for this fix.)
+ On Unix systems, the graphical version of Unison will check
the DISPLAY variable and, if it is not set, automatically fall
back to the textual user interface.
+ Synchronization paths (path preferences) are now matched
against the ignore preferences. So if a path is both specified
in a path preference and ignored, it will be skipped.
+ Numerous other bugfixes and small improvements.
Changes since 2.6.1:
* The synchronization of modification times has been disabled for
directories.
* Preference files may now include lines of the form include <name>,
which will cause name.prf to be read at that point.
* The synchronization of permission between Windows and Unix now
works properly.
* A binding CYGWIN=binmode in now added to the environment so that
the Cygwin port of OpenSSH works properly in a non-Cygwin context.
* The servercmd and addversionno preferences can now be used
together: -addversionno appends an appropriate -NNN to the server
command, which is found by using the value of the -servercmd
preference if there is one, or else just unison.
* Both '-pref=val' and '-pref val' are now allowed for boolean
values. (The former can be used to set a preference to false.)
* Lot of small bugs fixed.
Changes since 2.5.31:
* The log preference is now set to true by default, since the log
file seems useful for most users.
* Several miscellaneous bugfixes (most involving symlinks).
Changes since 2.5.25:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed (again).
* Several significant bugs introduced in 2.5.25 have been fixed.
Changes since 2.5.1:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* New functionality:
+ Unison now synchronizes file modtimes, user-ids, and
group-ids.
These new features are controlled by a set of new preferences,
all of which are currently false by default.
o When the times preference is set to true, file
modification times are propaged. (Because the
representations of time may not have the same granularity
on both replicas, Unison may not always be able to make
the modtimes precisely equal, but it will get them as
close as the operating systems involved allow.)
o When the owner preference is set to true, file ownership
information is synchronized.
o When the group preference is set to true, group
information is synchronized.
o When the numericIds preference is set to true, owner and
group information is synchronized numerically. By
default, owner and group numbers are converted to names
on each replica and these names are synchronized. (The
special user id 0 and the special group 0 are never
mapped via user/group names even if this preference is
not set.)
+ Added an integer-valued preference perms that can be used to
control the propagation of permission bits. The value of this
preference is a mask indicating which permission bits should
be synchronized. It is set by default to 0o1777: all bits but
the set-uid and set-gid bits are synchronised (synchronizing
theses latter bits can be a security hazard). If you want to
synchronize all bits, you can set the value of this preference
to -1.
+ Added a log preference (default false), which makes Unison
keep a complete record of the changes it makes to the
replicas. By default, this record is written to a file called
unison.log in the user's home directory (the value of the HOME
environment variable). If you want it someplace else, set the
logfile preference to the full pathname you want Unison to
use.
+ Added an ignorenot preference that maintains a set of patterns
for paths that should definitely not be ignored, whether or
not they match an ignore pattern. (That is, a path will now be
ignored iff it matches an ignore pattern and does not match
any ignorenot patterns.)
* User-interface improvements:
+ Roots are now displayed in the user interface in the same
order as they were given on the command line or in the
preferences file.
+ When the batch preference is set, the graphical user interface
no longer waits for user confirmation when it displays a
warning message: it simply pops up an advisory window with a
Dismiss button at the bottom and keeps on going.
+ Added a new preference for controlling how many status
messages are printed during update detection: statusdepth
controls the maximum depth for paths on the local machine
(longer paths are not displayed, nor are non-directory paths).
The value should be an integer; default is 1.
+ Removed the trace and silent preferences. They did not seem
very useful, and there were too many preferences for
controlling output in various ways.
+ The text UI now displays just the default command (the one
that will be used if the user just types <return>) instead of
all available commands. Typing ? will print the full list of
possibilities.
+ The function that finds the canonical hostname of the local
host (which is used, for example, in calculating the name of
the archive file used to remember which files have been
synchronized) normally uses the gethostname operating system
call. However, if the environment variable UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME
is set, its value will now be used instead. This makes it
easier to use Unison in situations where a machine's name
changes frequently (e.g., because it is a laptop and gets
moved around a lot).
+ File owner and group are now displayed in the "detail window"
at the bottom of the screen, when unison is configured to
synchronize them.
* For hackers:
+ Updated to Jacques Garrigue's new version of lablgtk, which
means we can throw away our local patched version.
If you're compiling the GTK version of unison from sources,
you'll need to update your copy of lablgtk to the developers
release. (Warning: installing lablgtk under Windows is
currently a bit challenging.)
+ The TODO.txt file (in the source distribution) has been
cleaned up and reorganized. The list of pending tasks should
be much easier to make sense of, for people that may want to
contribute their programming energies. There is also a
separate file BUGS.txt for open bugs.
+ The Tk user interface has been removed (it was not being
maintained and no longer compiles).
+ The debug preference now prints quite a bit of additional
information that should be useful for identifying sources of
problems.
+ The version number of the remote server is now checked right
away during the connection setup handshake, rather than later.
(Somebody sent a bug report of a server crash that turned out
to come from using inconsistent versions: better to check this
earlier and in a way that can't crash either client or
server.)
+ Unison now runs correctly on 64-bit architectures (e.g. Alpha
linux). We will not be distributing binaries for these
architectures ourselves (at least for a while) but if someone
would like to make them available, we'll be glad to provide a
link to them.
* Bug fixes:
+ Pattern matching (e.g. for ignore) is now case-insensitive
when Unison is in case-insensitive mode (i.e., when one of the
replicas is on a windows machine).
+ Some people had trouble with mysterious failures during
propagation of updates, where files would be falsely reported
as having changed during synchronization. This should be
fixed.
+ Numerous smaller fixes.
Changes since 2.4.1:
* Added a number of 'sorting modes' for the user interface. By
default, conflicting changes are displayed at the top, and the rest
of the entries are sorted in alphabetical order. This behavior can
be changed in the following ways:
+ Setting the sortnewfirst preference to true causes newly
created files to be displayed before changed files.
+ Setting sortbysize causes files to be displayed in increasing
order of size.
+ Giving the preference sortfirst=<pattern> (where <pattern> is
a path descriptor in the same format as 'ignore' and 'follow'
patterns, causes paths matching this pattern to be displayed
first.
+ Similarly, giving the preference sortlast=<pattern> causes
paths matching this pattern to be displayed last.
The sorting preferences are described in more detail in the user
manual. The sortnewfirst and sortbysize flags can also be accessed
from the 'Sort' menu in the grpahical user interface.
* Added two new preferences that can be used to change unison's
fundamental behavior to make it more like a mirroring tool instead
of a synchronizer.
+ Giving the preference prefer with argument <root> (by adding
-prefer <root> to the command line or prefer=<root>) to your
profile) means that, if there is a conflict, the contents of
<root> should be propagated to the other replica (with no
questions asked). Non-conflicting changes are treated as
usual.
+ Giving the preference force with argument <root> will make
unison resolve all differences in favor of the given root,
even if it was the other replica that was changed.
These options should be used with care! (More information is
available in the manual.)
* Small changes:
+ Changed default answer to 'Yes' in all two-button dialogs in
the graphical interface (this seems more intuitive).
+ The rsync preference has been removed (it was used to activate
rsync compression for file transfers, but rsync compression is
now enabled by default).
+ In the text user interface, the arrows indicating which
direction changes are being propagated are printed differently
when the user has overridden Unison's default recommendation
(====> instead of ---->). This matches the behavior of the
graphical interface, which displays such arrows in a different
color.
+ Carriage returns (Control-M's) are ignored at the ends of
lines in profiles, for Windows compatibility.
+ All preferences are now fully documented in the user manual.
Changes since 2.3.12:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* New/improved functionality:
+ A new preference -sortbysize controls the order in which
changes are displayed to the user: when it is set to true, the
smallest changed files are displayed first. (The default
setting is false.)
+ A new preference -sortnewfirst causes newly created files to
be listed before other updates in the user interface.
+ We now allow the ssh protocol to specify a port.
+ Incompatible change: The unison: protocol is deprecated, and
we added file: and socket:. You may have to modify your
profiles in the .unison directory. If a replica is specified
without an explicit protocol, we now assume it refers to a
file. (Previously "//saul/foo" meant to use SSH to connect to
saul, then access the foo directory. Now it means to access
saul via a remote file mechanism such as samba; the old effect
is now achieved by writing ssh://saul/foo.)
+ Changed the startup sequence for the case where roots are
given but no profile is given on the command line. The new
behavior is to use the default profile (creating it if it does
not exist), and temporarily override its roots. The manual
claimed that this case would work by reading no profile at
all, but AFAIK this was never true.
+ In all user interfaces, files with conflicts are always listed
first
+ A new preference 'sshversion' can be used to control which
version of ssh should be used to connect to the server. Legal
values are 1 and 2. (Default is empty, which will make unison
use whatever version of ssh is installed as the default 'ssh'
command.)
+ The situation when the permissions of a file was updated the
same on both side is now handled correctly (we used to report
a spurious conflict)
* Improvements for the Windows version:
+ The fact that filenames are treated case-insensitively under
Windows should now be handled correctly. The exact behavior is
described in the cross-platform section of the manual.
+ It should be possible to synchronize with Windows shares,
e.g., //host/drive/path.
+ Workarounds to the bug in syncing root directories in Windows.
The most difficult thing to fix is an ocaml bug: Unix.opendir
fails on c: in some versions of Windows.
* Improvements to the GTK user interface (the Tk interface is no
longer being maintained):
+ The UI now displays actions differently (in blue) when they
have been explicitly changed by the user from Unison's default
recommendation.
+ More colorful appearance.
+ The initial profile selection window works better.
+ If any transfers failed, a message to this effect is displayed
along with 'Synchronization complete' at the end of the
transfer phase (in case they may have scrolled off the top).
+ Added a global progress meter, displaying the percentage of
total bytes that have been transferred so far.
* Improvements to the text user interface:
+ The file details will be displayed automatically when a
conflict is been detected.
+ when a warning is generated (e.g. for a temporary file left
over from a previous run of unison) Unison will no longer wait
for a response if it is running in -batch mode.
+ The UI now displays a short list of possible inputs each time
it waits for user interaction.
+ The UI now quits immediately (rather than looping back and
starting the interaction again) if the user presses 'q' when
asked whether to propagate changes.
+ Pressing 'g' in the text user interface will proceed
immediately with propagating updates, without asking any more
questions.
* Documentation and installation changes:
+ The manual now includes a FAQ, plus sections on common
problems and on tricks contributed by users.
+ Both the download page and the download directory explicitly
say what are the current stable and beta-test version numbers.
+ The OCaml sources for the up-to-the-minute developers' version
(not guaranteed to be stable, or even to compile, at any given
time!) are now available from the download page.
+ Added a subsection to the manual describing cross-platform
issues (case conflicts, illegal filenames)
* Many small bug fixes and random improvements.
Changes since 2.3.1:
* Several bug fixes. The most important is a bug in the rsync module
that would occasionally cause change propagation to fail with a
'rename' error.
Changes since 2.2:
* The multi-threaded transport system is now disabled by default. (It
is not stable enough yet.)
* Various bug fixes.
* A new experimental feature:
The final component of a -path argument may now be the wildcard
specifier *. When Unison sees such a path, it expands this path on
the client into into the corresponding list of paths by listing the
contents of that directory.
Note that if you use wildcard paths from the command line, you will
probably need to use quotes or a backslash to prevent the * from
being interpreted by your shell.
If both roots are local, the contents of the first one will be used
for expanding wildcard paths. (Nb: this is the first one after the
canonization step - i.e., the one that is listed first in the user
interface - not the one listed first on the command line or in the
preferences file.)
Changes since 2.1:
* The transport subsystem now includes an implementation by Sylvain
Gommier and Norman Ramsey of Tridgell and Mackerras's rsync
protocol. This protocol achieves much faster transfers when only a
small part of a large file has been changed by sending just diffs.
This feature is mainly helpful for transfers over slow links--on
fast local area networks it can actually degrade performance--so we
have left it off by default. Start unison with the -rsync option
(or put rsync=true in your preferences file) to turn it on.
* "Progress bars" are now displayed during remote file transfers,
showing what percentage of each file has been transferred so far.
* The version numbering scheme has changed. New releases will now be
have numbers like 2.2.30, where the second component is incremented
on every significant public release and the third component is the
"patch level."
* Miscellaneous improvements to the GTK-based user interface.
* The manual is now available in PDF format.
* We are experimenting with using a multi-threaded transport
subsystem to transfer several files at the same time, making much
more effective use of available network bandwidth. This feature is
not completely stable yet, so by default it is disabled in the
release version of Unison.
If you want to play with the multi-threaded version, you'll need to
recompile Unison from sources (as described in the documentation),
setting the THREADS flag in Makefile.OCaml to true. Make sure that
your OCaml compiler has been installed with the -with-pthreads
configuration option. (You can verify this by checking whether the
file threads/threads.cma in the OCaml standard library directory
contains the string -lpthread near the end.)
Changes since 1.292:
* Reduced memory footprint (this is especially important during the
first run of unison, where it has to gather information about all
the files in both repositories).
* Fixed a bug that would cause the socket server under NT to fail
after the client exits.
* Added a SHIFT modifier to the Ignore menu shortcut keys in GTK
interface (to avoid hitting them accidentally).
Changes since 1.231:
* Tunneling over ssh is now supported in the Windows version. See the
installation section of the manual for detailed instructions.
* The transport subsystem now includes an implementation of the rsync
protocol, built by Sylvain Gommier and Norman Ramsey. This protocol
achieves much faster transfers when only a small part of a large
file has been changed by sending just diffs. The rsync feature is
off by default in the current version. Use the -rsync switch to
turn it on. (Nb. We still have a lot of tuning to do: you may not
notice much speedup yet.)
* We're experimenting with a multi-threaded transport subsystem,
written by Jerome Vouillon. The downloadable binaries are still
single-threaded: if you want to try the multi-threaded version,
you'll need to recompile from sources. (Say make THREADS=true.)
Native thread support from the compiler is required. Use the option
-threads N to select the maximal number of concurrent threads
(default is 5). Multi-threaded and single-threaded clients/servers
can interoperate.
* A new GTK-based user interface is now available, thanks to Jacques
Garrigue. The Tk user interface still works, but we'll be shifting
development effort to the GTK interface from now on.
* OCaml 3.00 is now required for compiling Unison from sources. The
modules uitk and myfileselect have been changed to use labltk
instead of camltk. To compile the Tk interface in Windows, you must
have ocaml-3.00 and tk8.3. When installing tk8.3, put it in c:\Tcl
rather than the suggested c:\Program Files\Tcl, and be sure to
install the headers and libraries (which are not installed by
default).
* Added a new -addversionno switch, which causes unison to use
unison-<currentversionnumber> instead of just unison as the remote
server command. This allows multiple versions of unison to coexist
conveniently on the same server: whichever version is run on the
client, the same version will be selected on the server.
Changes since 1.219:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* This version fixes several annoying bugs, including:
+ Some cases where propagation of file permissions was not
working.
+ umask is now ignored when creating directories
+ directories are create writable, so that a read-only directory
and its contents can be propagated.
+ Handling of warnings generated by the server.
+ Synchronizing a path whose parent is not a directory on both
sides is now flagged as erroneous.
+ Fixed some bugs related to symnbolic links and nonexistent
roots.
o When a change (deletion or new contents) is propagated
onto a 'follow'ed symlink, the file pointed to by the
link is now changed. (We used to change the link itself,
which doesn't fit our assertion that 'follow' means the
link is completely invisible)
o When one root did not exist, propagating the other root
on top of it used to fail, because unison could not
calculate the working directory into which to write
changes. This should be fixed.
* A human-readable timestamp has been added to Unison's archive
files.
* The semantics of Path and Name regular expressions now correspond
better.
* Some minor improvements to the text UI (e.g. a command for going
back to previous items)
* The organization of the export directory has changed -- should be
easier to find / download things now.
Changes since 1.200:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* This version has not been tested extensively on Windows.
* Major internal changes designed to make unison safer to run at the
same time as the replicas are being changed by the user.
* Internal performance improvements.
Changes since 1.190:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* A number of internal functions have been changed to reduce the
amount of memory allocation, especially during the first
synchronization. This should help power users with very big
replicas.
* Reimplementation of low-level remote procedure call stuff, in
preparation for adding rsync-like smart file transfer in a later
release.
* Miscellaneous bug fixes.
Changes since 1.180:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* Fixed some small bugs in the interpretation of ignore patterns.
* Fixed some problems that were preventing the Windows version from
working correctly when click-started.
* Fixes to treatment of file permissions under Windows, which were
causing spurious reports of different permissions when
synchronizing between windows and unix systems.
* Fixed one more non-tail-recursive list processing function, which
was causing stack overflows when synchronizing very large replicas.
Changes since 1.169:
* The text user interface now provides commands for ignoring files.
* We found and fixed some more non-tail-recursive list processing
functions. Some power users have reported success with very large
replicas.
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Files ending in .tmp are no longer ignored
automatically. If you want to ignore such files, put an appropriate
ignore pattern in your profile.
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: The syntax of ignore and follow patterns has
changed. Instead of putting a line of the form
ignore = <regexp>
in your profile (.unison/default.prf), you should put:
ignore = Regex <regexp>
Moreover, two other styles of pattern are also recognized:
ignore = Name <name>
matches any path in which one component matches <name>, while
ignore = Path <path>
matches exactly the path <path>.
Standard "globbing" conventions can be used in <name> and <path>:
+ a ? matches any single character except /
+ a * matches any sequence of characters not including /
+ [xyz] matches any character from the set {x, y, z }
+ {a,bb,ccc} matches any one of a, bb, or ccc.
See the user manual for some examples.
Changes since 1.146:
* Some users were reporting stack overflows when synchronizing huge
directories. We found and fixed some non-tail-recursive list
processing functions, which we hope will solve the problem. Please
give it a try and let us know.
* Major additions to the documentation.
Changes since 1.142:
* Major internal tidying and many small bugfixes.
* Major additions to the user manual.
* Unison can now be started with no arguments - it will prompt
automatically for the name of a profile file containing the roots
to be synchronized. This makes it possible to start the graphical
UI from a desktop icon.
* Fixed a small bug where the text UI on NT was raising a 'no such
signal' exception.
Changes since 1.139:
* The precompiled windows binary in the last release was compiled
with an old OCaml compiler, causing propagation of permissions not
to work (and perhaps leading to some other strange behaviors we've
heard reports about). This has been corrected. If you're using
precompiled binaries on Windows, please upgrade.
* Added a -debug command line flag, which controls debugging of
various modules. Say -debug XXX to enable debug tracing for module
XXX, or -debug all to turn on absolutely everything.
* Fixed a small bug where the text UI on NT was raising a 'no such
signal' exception.
Changes since 1.111:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: The names and formats of the preference files
in the .unison directory have changed. In particular:
+ the file "prefs" should be renamed to default.prf
+ the contents of the file "ignore" should be merged into
default.prf. Each line of the form REGEXP in ignore should
become a line of the form ignore = REGEXP in default.prf.
* Unison now handles permission bits and symbolic links. See the
manual for details.
* You can now have different preference files in your .unison
directory. If you start unison like this
unison profilename
(i.e. with just one "anonymous" command-line argument), then the
file ~/.unison/profilename.prf will be loaded instead of
default.prf.
* Some improvements to terminal handling in the text user interface
* Added a switch -killServer that terminates the remote server
process when the unison client is shutting down, even when using
sockets for communication. (By default, a remote server created
using ssh/rsh is terminated automatically, while a socket server is
left running.)
* When started in 'socket server' mode, unison prints 'server
started' on stderr when it is ready to accept connections. (This
may be useful for scripts that want to tell when a socket-mode
server has finished initialization.)
* We now make a nightly mirror of our current internal development
tree, in case anyone wants an up-to-the-minute version to hack
around with.
* Added a file CONTRIB with some suggestions for how to help us make
Unison better.
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