Bug#802919: unison: synchronization incompatibility when built with Ocaml versions pre/post-4.02
Package: unison
Version: 2.48.3-1
Severity: normal
Dear Maintainer,
Since ocaml 4.02 recently entered unstable, I thought it might be a
good time to bring up this issue (I haven't seen it discussed in
another bug).
Due to a change in ocaml's serialization format, unison built with an
ocaml pre-4.02 can't synchronize with one built with 4.02 and
later. This causes a compatibility mess, since the usual requirement
that both endpoints must have the same unison version is no longer
sufficient: they now have to have both the same unison version *and*
be built by compatible versions of ocaml, either both pre-4.02 or both
post-4.02.
There is some discussion on the unison-users list here:
http://marc.info/?l=unison-users&m=142286809310149&w=2
I am not sure what the best solution is. For the near-term future,
there will probably be a significant number of installations needing
both to be available. For example any Debian stable server will be
using the pre-4.02 unison for some time to come. But anyone using
unison on OSX via Homebrew, Macports, or pkgsrc already needs a
post-4.02 version to sync with.
-Mark
-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 4.2.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: sysvinit (via /sbin/init)
Versions of packages unison depends on:
ii libc6 2.19-22
Versions of packages unison recommends:
ii openssh-client [ssh-client] 1:6.9p1-2
Versions of packages unison suggests:
pn unison-all <none>
-- no debconf information
--
Mark J. Nelson
Anadrome Research
http://www.anadrome.org
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