Here we list planned and imagined improvements to Unison. Ones that we
regard as most important are marked with more *s. (Note that, since Unison
is no longer under active development [though it is still heavily used by
its original developers], the presence of a suggestion in this file is not
promise that anybody is going to implement it!)
###########################################################################
* CURRENT
* =======
* Make some preferences per-host
- file-system type
- canonical name of the host
- fastcheck
- backup
- fs watcher command
* Work on the Unison side
- create temp file
- start watcher based on watcherosx switch, passing all paths as args
- on each loop
- parse results into shallow and deep ones
- combine the two lists (marking which is which)
- sort the list
- if there are any adjacent pairs where the first is a prefix of the
second, drop the second and mark the first as deep
- go through the list and drop any item for whioch any PREFIX of
its path matches 'ignore' and doesn't match 'ignorenot'
- bulletproof, handling fatal errors and restarting completely from
scratch if necessary
* The directory scanning optimization is currently disabled under Windows,
as FAT partitions do not have directory modification times.
we could check whether we are on an NTFS partition by calling
GetVolumeInformation to get the filesystem name.
* We could defer most fingerprint computations to the propagation phase;
this would improve the user experience and save some fingerprints:
- do not compute fingerprint of new files during update detection
- during reconciliation, try to decide what to do based on what is
known so far
- for undecided paths (two files), request checksums (in batch)
- hashes are finally computed during propagation
###########################################################################
* SOON
* ====
**** Document: root, fspath, path (local/not)
**** Nice code cleanup trick: Add a phantom type param to Pref (and Pred?)
that prevents mutation from outside the module where the preference is
defined (by exposing it with a weak type).
*** Un-writeable directories can't be copied.
The 'rename' operation at the end of Files.copy will fail (at least on
OSX) if the path being renamed points to a directory and that directory
(not the one containing it!) is not writeable by the user. To fix this,
we'd need to notice when we are renaming a directory and temporarily
make it writeable just before the rename and then make it what it should
be just after. But I don't feel like writing this bit of code right
now, to handle such a corner case. [BCP, November 2008]
*** [Marcus Sundman, 2008] Unison can't propagate changes in read-only
folders. The correct way to do it is to temporarily add write
permissions for the user to the folder, then do the changes and then
reset the permissions. Now unison tries to just do the changes, which
fails with a "permission denied" error.
It would be nice if Unison could have the "power" to copy write-protected
files, maybe as an option.
*** Fix the pred module to understand negation and delete XXXnot predicates
*** Web
- Add a "supported platforms" page mentioning system-specific stuff
- Add an installation instructions page, removing it from the manual
** add '<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">'
to the head section of all the unison web pages.
*** See if we can get rid of some Osx.XXX stuff (e.g. ressLength!?)
* There is no way of selecting files with wildchar. I had to use
ignorenot = Name opt/root/.unison/*.prf
ignore = Name opt/root/.unison/*
But this is inconvinent, but the worse is that it gets complicated very
fast and I cannot make it for more complicated scenarios. I would expect
something like (suggestion):
Files = opt/root/.unison/*.prf
* If a directory does not exist in one of the host, unison (for
security reasons, which I like) pops up a window and Quit is the only
option. I would expect a message stating mere clearly on which host and
direcory and an option to create that directory. I had recently to make
a lot of reinstalls and new pendrives and it took a long time to create
all those dirs. Someone in the list even made a script to do the job!!!
** giving a -path preference whose parent dir doesn't exist currently causes
Unison to abort with a fatal error. Would be better if it just
signalled an error for that file.
If we synchronize a path whose parent doesn't exist in one replica, we'll
fail. Might be nicer to create the parent path if needed.
* When synchronizing FAT32, there could be an explicit command for
ignoring attributes. The problem happens when one side is FAT32 but the
other is not, or when mounting parameters are different.
* MERGE FUNCTIONALITY
* ===================
* Merge issues:
- It would be better to ignore the exit status of the external merge
tool and just look at what files it produced to decide what happened
- The function that runs the external program should not grab stdin /
stdout / stderr if Unison is running with the text UI.
- The confirmation step should offer to display the new merged file.
- (There are some older merge issues documented below)
**** Remaining problem with merging code:
- create two directories, each containing a .txt file
- sync so they are equal
- change the file so that one region is in conflict and another
region has changes that can be propagated correctly
- sync
- now we should be able to change the second region in just one file,
sync again, and see the change propagate; instead, it conflicts
- diagnosis: the merge stuff is not correctly updating the archive in
the event of a partial reconciliation
** An idea for the interface to the external merge functionality:
created a general mechanism for invoking external functionality...
- in profile, declare a command of the form
key M = external "merge ##1 ##2 ###" --> overwriting originals
(concrete syntax open to discussion!). Main parts are
- what key to bind it to in the UI(s)
- the command line to start up
- variables (##1 and ##2) for the local and remote files
(the remote file will automatically be copied to a local temp
file, if this variable is used)
- a variable (###) for a temporary output file
- an indication of what to do with this output file
(or maybe this could be automatic)
- (should also indicate which machine(s) to run the command on?)
** small additions to merge functionality:
- if the external merge program *deletes* one of the files it is given,
Unison should interpret this as "Copy the other file onto this location
(instead of merging)". This will allow some other interesting
functionality, e.g. external programs that may decide to keep both
versions by moving one of them out of the way (mh-rename).
- the invocation of the external 'diff' program should be selectable
using the same conventions as the 'merge' program
- would be nice to be able to invoke DIFFERENT merge programs
depending on paths
** We should document other available merge tools, e.g.,
idiff [BCP has a copy of the code for idiff that Norman sent.]
** Suggestion for extending merge functionality
- add a new kind of preference -- a conditional stringlist preference
- in the preference file, each value looks like either
prefname = string
or
prefname = string WHEN Path PPPPP
prefname = string WHEN Name XXXXX
prefname = string WHEN Regex XXXXX
- when we look up such a preference, we provide a current path, and it
returns the one that matches the current path, if any
* BUILDING AND INSTALLING
* =======================
** 'make install' could be improved (and documented)
1. Typing "make install' after a "make" should simply install the
program that was made, not attempt to do a remake with different options.
===> Doesn't it???
2. "make install' should try to install as /usr/local/bin/unison, not
~/bin/, especially considering that ~/bin is the wrong place to do the
install under OSX (it should be ~/Apps or ~/Apps/bin)
should strip symbols from binary files in 'make exportnative'
* DOCUMENTATION
* =============
** Add something to docs about how to use 'rootalias'. Include an
explanation of the semantics, a couple of examples, and a suggestion
for how to debug what it's doing by turning on appropriate debugging
flags. (And maybe we should actually make the debug output there a
bit more verbose?)
** Misc:
- document good trick: use -1 switch to ssh if the paths are set up wrong
on the remote host
- should say whether trailing slashes are ok for paths; should say
that leading slashes are illegal.
===> check
- not so clear what you have to do with a Regex to match a directory
and all its subfiles: foo or foo/ or foo/.* ?
===> the first. document it. (Does foo/ match foo? I don't think so.
Document, one way or the other.)
- what happens when files are included whose parent dirs are
excluded? (With Regex? With multiple Path and Name?)
===> document
- the documentation is very good, but i couldn't find a description of how
to respond to the prompts in the textual ui. is that explained
somewhere?
* SMALL FUNCTIONALITY IMPROVEMENTS
* ================================
**** Please let me say
root = ~/bla
instead of requiring me to give an absolute path to my home dir.
** ~/foo seems to work on the command line but not in root = ~/foo in the
config file.
--
Similarly: It seems that when one specifies logfile = foobar
in the preferences file, then unison assumes that it is relative to the
current directory. Since neither ~ nor $HOME are understood in the
preference file, this is an inconvenience, because it forces the user to
remember to run unison from the root directory.
===> Would be nice to support ~ internally
*** [Adrian Stephens, 2007] I would like the scope of rootalias to be
expanded so that any command that expects a root will perform aliasing
on the command. In my application, I need to change the root statement
as I move my machine from desk to the road. I also have a "force"
statement, and I also have to remember to edit this to match. It would
be more convenient to have to edit in a single place and, more
importantly, avoids introducing any inconsistency.
--- [BCP:] I like this idea. However, since I'm struggling at the
moment to find time to finish polishing 2.27 to become the new stable
release, I am not going to undertake to implement it. If you (or
someone else) would like to give it a shot, here is what I think needs
to happen:
- Move the rootalias preference and the rootalias-expanding code from
Update.root2stringOrAlias into the Common module (creating a new
function there for rootalias expansion).
- Find places like Recon.lookupPreferredRoot that deal with names of
roots and add a call to the rootalias-expanding function.
*** Delete old backups mechanism and, instead, extend new one to cover its
functionality
- put backups in same dir as files by default
- otherwise, put them in a central place if one is given
- Update.incrVersionsOfBackups should not be externally visible
*** unison -help doesn't go to stdout so it's hard to pipe it into less
===> Probably *all* output should go to stdout, not stderr (but maybe
we need a switch to recover the current behavior)
* Maybe we should write debugging and tracing information to stdout
instead of stderr?
*** If a root resides on a `host' with an ever and unpredictably changing
host name (like a public login cluster with dozens of machines and a
shared file system), listing each possible host name for this root is
not feasible. The ability of specifing patterns in rootaliases would
help a lot in this case. I'm thinking of something like this:
rootalias = //.*//afs/cern.ch/user/n/nagya ->
//cern.ch//afs/cern.ch/user/n/nagya [NAGY Andras <nagya@inf.elte.hu>,
March 12]
===> We definitely ought to do something about this problem -- it's
increasingly common. Not sure if this is the right proposal, but
something.
*** Currently, if a file changes on either side between the initial update
detection and the time when the transport module tries to propagate
changes, the transport is aborted. But if the change occurred on the
replica that is being used as the source for the transfer (which will
be the common case!), then there is no reason to abort -- we should
just propagate the newest version.
*** When unison notices lock files in the archive directory, it should
offer to delete them *for* the user, rather than forcing the user to
delete them manually.
*** A switch to include NTFS ACE/ACL file permissions to be copied when
copying from one NTFS location to another NTFS location. As I
mentioned this is less generic, but of fundamental usefullness in
Windows usage, as NTFS permissions are absolutely essential in many
backup/replication situations in Windows systems. Robocopy has the
/SEC switch, but Unison is a far better tool, and I was hoping in that
light that Unison could implement the rights/permissions stuff also.
*** There is no command-line argument to tell Unison where the .unison
directory is; Unison finds it in the environment or not at all. I was
able to workaround this with a symbolic link to put .unison where it was
expected, but it seems like an easy option to add.
*** The other is possibly a bit more difficult, but more useful as well. There
is a brief window of vulnerability between when the local server is started
and when the remote client connects to it. (It's no longer than that
because Unison won't take more than one connection at a time.) I can
tolerate it, but the window could be eliminated entirely by allowing socket
connections to require a nonce.
** Allow 'default.prf' in place of 'default' for profile names
** [dlux@dlux.hu, Feb 2002] For some apps (e.g., some mail readers?),
putting temp files in the same directory as the file we're about to
overwrite is bad/dangerous. Some alternatives that we could
consider...
- Add a configuration option for temporary directory and notice the
user about the volume restrictions in the docs and then if the user
does not consider it, then we use a non-atomic (copy + unlink)
rename. In an ideal environment (where the user consider this
restriction), it makes possible to sync a maildir folder while it is
online!
- An even better solution: One more temporary file step. If the user
sets the temporary directory, then we synchronize the files to that
directory, and if the file is downloaded/uploaded fully, then we move
it to a tempfile into the target directory (with .unison.tmp
extension) and then rename it into the final name.
** Would be good to (optionally) change the semantics of the "backup"
functionality, so that Unison would not insist on making a *full*
backup of the whole replica, but just do so lazily. (I.e., it would
not make backups when files get put into the archive, but only when
they actually get changed.)
** Would also be nice to allow the backup preference to be set
differently on different hosts -- so that all the backups could be
kept on one side (if there is no space on the other side, e.g.). The
obvious way to do this is to add a switch like '-suppressbackupsonroot
BLAH' but this feels a bit ad hoc. It would be nicer to decide, in
general, which preferences can sensibly have different settings on
different roots (e.g., the location of the archive dir, ...) and
provide a general mechanism for setting them per-host.
** no spec for escaping regexp chars; spaces? newlines? tabs? others?
mechanism for getting the list of files from another program (plugin)?
===> needs to be documented (look at rx.ml)
* [July 2002, S. Garfinkel] Maybe we should turn the 'time' option on by
default. We might need to help people a little on the upgrading,
though. When you did a sync with time=false, then a sync with
time=true, you get a zillion conflicts...
==> This is probably a good idea, but I'm a little scared of all the
messages we'd get from upgrading users
==> Also, "make" can get confused when the 'time' option is set
* URI pathname syntax
Why is the following command wrong?
unison -servercmd `which unison` /usr/local ssh://labrador/usr/local
It took me three tries and careful reading of the documentation to
figure it out. I don't have any good suggestions here, other than
that I think the whole issue of relative vs absolute pathnames needs
serious thought. I think the current interfaces do not work very
well. One possibility that I will float is that you invent a special
character string to refer to the root of synchronization.
E.g., interpret ~ as $HOME in roots.
--
Also: we should add the file:// syntax to URIs...
file://C:/Necula (C:/Necula on the local file system)
file:////share/subdir (//share/subdir as from the point of view of
the local file system)
unison://host///share/subdir
--
Should local roots in a profile be canonized?
Right now, we can have a relative root in the profile. This
is going to be a problem if unison is started in a different
directory.
* At the moment, if Unison is interrupted during a non-atomic operation
on the file system, the user has to clean things up manually, following
the instructions in the the recovery log. We should do that for them.
(This is actually a bit tricky, since we need to be careful about what
might happen if unison crashes during recovery, etc. The best way to
accomplish this would be to write a general logging/recovery facility
in OCaml.)
* Dealing with ACLs: Maybe this is what we should do actually. We could
specify a user (and similarly a group) to unison. It would be
interpreted in a special way: if a file is owned by this user, unison
will rather consider that the owner of the file is undefined. So, when
a file owned by an unkown user is synchronized, the file owner is set
to the default user. Then, on the next synchronizations, unison will
consider that the owner has not been propagated and try again. [Should
be easy once the reconciler is made more modular]
* The -terse preference should suppress more (in fact, almost all)
messages in the text ui. See Dale Worley's message for a detailed
proposal.
* [Joerg von den Hoff, 2009] I use unison (up to now) only from the command
line and it's used from within scripts or Makefiles. it is therefore
unfortunate that by default the GUI pops up and one has to use `unison -ui
text' to avoid this. it would seem better to have it the other way round,
i.e., to make the CLI the default and to require `unison -ui graphic' to
start up the GUI from the command line (I would argue that people using the
GUI regularly will start it anyway by double clicking the app)
add a switch '-logerrors' that makes unison log error messages to a
separate file in addition to the standard logfile
Update checking over NFS might be *much* faster if we use only relative
pathnames (absolute paths may require an RPC per level!?)
[Ben Wong, Aug 2002] Why not make unison fall back to addversionno if it
would otherwise bomb out with an incorrect version number? That way I
wouldn't have to educate people on how to use Unison at my site; it'd
"just work".
The -sortbysize is nice, but what I would really like is a -limitbysize.
When I'm connected over a modem line, I would like not to transfer the
larger files that need synchronization. That can wait until I am
connected via a faster connection. What I presently do is allow unison
to run in -sortbysize mode, and abort once I have all my little, more
important files. -limitbysize should simply filter the list of transfer
to only those that are below the threshold size. The syntax is
obvious... It should be -limitbysize xxx, where xxx is the size
(preferably in kb, but bytes will do as well).
[From Yan Seiner]
Can unison modify the (*nix) environment to show the
ip/name/some_other_id of the system making the connection? This would
help tremendously.
For example, vtun does this:
---
root 6319 0.0 0.6 1984 852 ? S< Aug27 0:37 vtund[s]:
bgsludge tun tun10
root 6324 0.0 0.6 1984 852 ? S< Aug27 2:00 vtund[s]:
cardinal tun tun0
root 17001 0.0 0.6 1984 848 ? S< Aug27 0:05 vtund[s]:
wtseller tun tun11
root 20100 0.0 0.6 1984 852 ? S< Aug28 0:02 vtund[s]:
cardridg tun tun1
----
So I know I have four sessions, to each named machine, and I know
immediately who is connected and who is not. If I have to kill a
session, I don't kill the wrong one.
Dale Worley's suggestion for relocating archives:
> You're right: it's not all that tricky. So would you be happy if you
> could run unison in a special mode like this
> unison -relocate //old-host1//path1 //old-host2//path2 \
> //new-host1//path1 //new-host2//path2
> (where all the hosts and paths are normalized) and it would move the
> archives for you on both machines?
Actually, I think that what you want is for the user to specify the
old paths in *normalized* form and the new paths in *non-normalized*
form. That is, unison uses the old paths literally as provided by the
user, but it applies the usual normalization algorithm to the new
paths.
This may sound strange, but I think that it's the Right Thing:
- There is no guarantee that the normalization algorithm, applied to
the old paths as the user used to specify them, normalizes to the
the normalized paths that are recorded in the archive. Indeed,
there may no longer be *any* path which normalizes to the recorded
paths.
- The user can extract the normalized old paths from the second line
of the archive files. This is clumsy, but reliable. And we don't
intend the user to relocate an archive very often.
- But for the new paths, you want to normalize what the user supplies,
because he doesn't know in advance how Unison is going to normalize
the new paths, and may well specify them incorrectly. That would
leave him with a relocated archive that he might not be able to use
at all.
You might want to put quotes around the pathnames in the second line
of the archive, since MS-Windows directory names can contain spaces,
etc.
Would be nice to be able to run unison in a special mode like this
unison -relocate //old-host1//path1 //old-host2//path2 \
//new-host1//path1 //new-host2//path2
(where all the hosts and paths are canonized) and have it move the
archives for you on both machines?
For safety...
- Add a preference 'maxdelete' taking an integer parameter, default 100
(or perhaps even less -- keeping it fairly small will help naive users
avoid shooting themselves in the foot). A negative number means
skip this check (i.e., infinity).
- When the transport subsystem gets control (i.e., just after the user
says 'go' to the user interface, when not running in batch mode)
it first checks the number of files that are going to be deleted
(including all the contents of any directories that are marked for
deletion). If it is more than maxdelete (and maxdelete is
positive), then...
- If we're in batch mode (batch=true), we halt without doing
anything.
- If we're not in batch mode, we display a warning message and
make the user confirm. (If they do *not* confirm, it would be
nice to dump them back into the user interface again, but this
would require a little rewriting of our control flow.)
- Would also be nice to include a display in the UI someplace that says
how many files are to be deleted/changed/created plus how many bytes
to be transferred, and a warning signal (display in red or something)
if these exceed the current setting of maxdelete.
It would be nice if unison had a tool by which it could regenerate all
the MD5 sums and compare them to what it has stored, then produce a list
of files that are different. I obviously cannot count on file size and
date in this case; those may not have changed but the contents may be
corrupt.
If the connection to the server goes away and then comes back up, it
would be nice if Unison would transparently re-establish it (at least,
when this makes sense!)
Better documentation of the -backups flag, and a way to expire old backups
Add a preference that makes the reconciler ignore prefs-only differences
between files (not updating the archive, though -- just suppressing
the difference -- will this slow things down too much?? Maybe it needs
to happen in the update detector, before things are transmitted across
the network.)
Perhaps we should interpret both / and the local separator as path
separators, i.e., under Windows / and \, under Mac / and :, and under
Unix just /. For Windows this will be fine, since / is not allowed in
filenames.
Maybe we should never emit a conflict for modtimes; instead, we just
propagate the largest one.
[Ivo Welch] I would do a quick test of case sensitivity in the program
itself at the time you do a first prf sync, so that the user does not have
to bother with it. Just write two files on each end which differ in case,
and see if there is overwriting. Then do the smart thing. The long-named
file in the .unison directory should keep this information thereafter.
(BCP: Implementing this is more difficult than it might seem. E.g.,
whenever a symlink is followed we might need to go through the same
exercise. And then we'd need to be able to deal with replicas that are not
all one way or the other...)
[Ivo Welch] I would give some examples in the man page of what an xxx
specification is.
[Ivo Welch] I would allow '--' switches, in addition to the '-' switch spec.
[Ivo Welch] On OSX, create a link from ~/Library/Application Support/Unison
to .unison, just for ease of finding it. It took me a long time to find my
.prf files.
[Ivo Welch] the OSX GUI front end should be clear which side (left or right)
the local host and which side the remote host is.
* USER INTERFACE
* ==============
** in gtk ui, display green checkmark next to finished items even if their
direction indicates a conflict; do not list such items as "skipped" at
the end
** In both UIs, show how many bytes/files were successfully transferred
at the end
** Should support auto-termination of the graphical UI (switch-controlled)
* Unison starts in the usual way and checks for changes
* If there are no conflicts, it proceeds without waiting for confirmation
* If there *are* conflicts, it waits for instructions, just like now
* In either case, when it's finished transferring the changes, it quits
* [Matthew Swift] in the GTK gui at least,
display the total MB or #files or whatever it is that the ticking
%-meter is referring to when it goes from 0 to 100. it is useful to
know how big the xfer is going to be before starting it (might induce me
to choose "sort by size", or abandon and choose a smaller subset, etc.).
Also, esp. since the gui is single-threaded and unresponsive, i would
like to know what size of a synch that I am for example 50% or 22%
through. I know that an ETA and other things we're used to from many
downloading apps would require quite a bit of code, but it would help a
lot just to display whatever constant is represented by 100%.
* [BCP] Error reporting for per-file problems during updating leaves
something to be desired. In particular, there's no indication even of
which host the problem occurred on. (I added something that includes
"root 1" or "root 2", but I'm not sure that's better than nothing.) If
there are errors on both hosts, only one will be reported. If there
are lots of errors in a subdir, only the first will be reported.
Recon.propagateUpdates would be a starting point for changes.
* [Jamey Leifer]
Would be nice if both UIs had a "revert to Unison's proposal" button...
* [Jamey Leifer]
[graphic ui, wishlist] The documentation topics aren't searchable. As
a result "unison -doc running | less" is still indispensable if one
wants to find anything. I suggest adding a box
"search in this topic: ---"
which is always available in the doc viewer. It would be nice to
support keyboard shortcuts in the "less" style, namely "/", "n", and
"N" (i.e. search, next, previous) to avoid too much clicking.
[graphic ui, wishlist] Ditto as far as searchability for diff reports.
* Would be nice to have a keystroke in the UI that means 'add the current
directory to the set of ignore patterns.'
* In the text UI, during the transport phase, print each file being
transferred on *one* line, with an arrow to indicate which way (and
dropping the explicit indication of which host from and to). The
logfile should be more explicit.
* The unison gui currently displays a percentage completion in the lower right
corner. I would find it comforting if it would also display an effective
bandwidth there, i.e., how many bits per second are flowing through the
transport layer? I make this request because owing to a hardware
catastrophe, I have just started using Unison through the phone lines, and
it seems to do nothing for a long period of time. I don't know whether
to blame the cheap modem, the cheap ISP, or whether Unison simply isn't
telling me that bits are flowing through the wire. (netstat -tn
suggests not much is happening, but I don't know if the results can
be trusted.)
* Would it be hard to add "tool tips" to the buttons in the UI?
==> Look for "tooltip" in examples/testgtk.ml.
The easiest way is with a toolbar, but you can also add tooltips to any
widget (cf lines 867 and after).
* > On a line, I would like to have a description of the action to be taken in
> clear words: (e.g. will erase file on local or will copy from local to
> remote, etc.)
This might be a good use for "tool tips," if I knew how to make them work
using lablGTK.
* The menu help for left/right arrow both said `transfer local to local'.
Not helpful. The items in question are pathnames, which you might not
have to abbreviate. To save space one might consider replacing any
common prefix, and also short prefixes that look like they might be
automounter goo, with an ellipsis. Then show, e.g., 20 chars. I'd
also be willing to name paths in my profile, e.g., replica flatcoat =
/home/cellar/nr replica cellar = /m/cellar60/nr This would be
especially attractive if my short names were meaningful on the command
line.
* In the GTK user interface, it would be nice to be able to put up a window
displaying the contents of the log file (and add log messages to it
dynamically as we're working). Be careful, though: the log could get
large and we don't want this to be too slow.
* Could there be an option between -ui text and -ui graphic that when combine
with -batch and -auto would start in text mode, but pop up an interactive
graphic window when real conflicts happens.
* [Jamey Leifer] I think "unison -doc" should be mapped to "unison
-doc topics" and the error message for the former eliminated.
Unison's gui offers an `Actions' menu with a variety of features
regarding preferences. I would love to see an action with the following
semantics: if the two files differ only in their modification time,
prefer the older modification time.
===> This would be easy to add, but I am beginning to worry that we are
getting too many funny little switches like this. We should think
about them all together and make sure they make sense.
I'm watching it sync a very large file that I don't want anyway, and I'm in
a hurry. I'd like a way to say "forget that file, I don't care about it, go
on to the next one you have to sync". Doesn't sound hard...?
[Perdita Stevens, Perdita.Stevens@dcs.ed.ac.uk, Mar 14 2002]
===> It's not trivial (involves some subtle stuff about our RPC
implementation and the single-thread nature of the GUI), but might
not be impossible either.
"Quit" during synchronization should abort all current operations (so
that temporary files are deleted) before exiting.
===> Again, requires some careful thinking about how this would work
with the RPC layer.
It would be nice to have a command in the GUI that would allow a single
path within the replica to be selected from a file dialog and
synchronized.
[From Manuel Serrano] Would be nice to put the arrows in different
directions in different colors, so that, e.g., you could quickly scan the
list of changes and make sure that they are all in the same direction
===> We tried this, but we couldn't find color combinations that did not
seem confusing. (Two different shades of green? Three? ...) If we
really want this, probably the best is to put in some preferences for the
user to control the colors of all the arrows individually.
Text mode user interface should be brought up to date with graphical
interface (it should prompt for profile creation, root
entry, etc.; command characters should be the same; ...)
Since the manual is pretty big, it would be nice if the on-line version
were accessible through cascading menus, allowing direct access to
individual subsections. It would also be nice if it were formatted a
bit more attractively, using proportional-width fonts, etc. (Does GTK
have something like an RTF widget?)
If I have a change I look at the detail window. It would be nice to be
able to click on one of the lines there instead of pressing one of <-
or ->. For one thing in the detail window the relative position of the
two files is up and down and translating that to <- or -> is somewhat
unintuitive.
Also, it would be nice to highlight in the detailed window the
elements that have changed.
The UI window should display the current roots somewhere.
There should be a -geometry command-line interface, following the usual X
conventions.
put in a command-line option that makes fatal errors exit right away
without displaying anything in the graphical UI (for debugging)
Use the CTree widget to display the list of files
Add the ability to close and open directories in the UI.
it would be nice to give a visual indication of which files are
particularly big, so that the user can tell where the transfer
operations may get slowed down. Maybe a "size bar" showing the log
of the size (perhaps also color coded).
===> less urgent now because we can re-sort the update items by size
Would it be hard to allow long-running transfers to be aborted?
For instance, the key "/" aborts the transmission of the selected file
OR:
Allow the user to terminate individual operations by clicking a
"cancel" button. (This is not completely straightforward because
the whole program is single-threaded. But it should be possible for
the low-level transport code in remote.ml to realize that the
operation has been aborted, clean up, and raise an exception.)
It would be nice if the initial 'usage' message were not so long. Maybe
we could split options into 'novice' and 'expert' ones, and only print
the novice ones (with an indication how to obtain the full expert
printout).
> Show diff should behave as an emacs view-mode buffer and quit on a single
> 'q' in the window, or better quit even without focus be sent to the diff
> window...
The UI for the diff functionality needs some polishing. (Also, it should
be merged with the new "merge" functionality.)
would be nice to be able to "Proceed" just the selected line
might be nice if the GUI would beep when finished syncing (needs to be
switch-selectable and off by default, naturally). Is this easy with
LablGTK?
It would be nice to be able to STOP the GUI in the middle of propagating
changes.
* TIDYING
* =======
* Go through the sources and make all fatal and transient error messages
as informative as possible
More documentation (especially in the interface files) is always nice.
In particular, there isn't enough documentation of the big picture.
It isn't clear how to fit together archives, servers, paths, roots,
update detection, reconciliation, conflict resolution, or the user
interface...
Ocamlexc v1.0, the uncaught exceptions analyzer for Objective Caml is now
available from Pessaux's home page. It would be fun to run it over the
Unison sources and see if it reveals any problems.
* LARGER EXTENSIONS
* =================
Fast update checking would be cool... Some resources:
FAM (used in Enlightenment)
dnotify (linux 2.4)
BSD kqueue
the "VFS stacking layer" implemented by a guy at Columbia
[From JMS]
Some update detection speed improvement suggestions:
- Read the FFS (Fast Filesystem) paper for hints
- change the working directory instead of using absolute paths; this
avoids calls to the evil iname(?) facility in the kernel
- work breadth-first instead of depth first, to keep things in the
kernel cache
Rewrite recon.ml in a more modular way. Probably, have for each property
a function taking the previous file state and the state on each
replicas, and returning in what the synchronization operation should be
(nothing, left, right, conflict); a combinator then merge the results.
How about a facility so that you can specify more than one pair of
file systems for a single invocation of Unison? This would be like
calling Unison multiple times, except that it would ask all the
questions at once. Better yet, we could actually deal with the
multi-replica case. (The latter is pretty hard.)
What about invoking some user-specified operation on each file as it
is transferred? Or in each directory where things have changed?
(This will require some careful design work.)
Consider using other authentication services (e.g. Kerberos) instead
of / in addition to ssh.
What happens when we synchronize, then decide to ignore some existing file
What happens to the entry in the archive? If mirroring, it may be
large, we probably want to delete it from the archive.
File level synchronization (bookmarks, mailboxes)
It might be nice to implement an (optional) safety check that detects
aliasing within a replica due to followed links (or hard links) and
complains if it finds any. This should not be *too* expensive, since
we already know all the inode numbers. (Even if it *is* expensive, it
might be useful to allow users to do this occasionally, if they are
paranoid.)
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