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Bug#802919: unison: synchronization incompatibility when built with Ocaml versions pre/post-4.02



On 03/07/2017 21:54, Conrad Hughes wrote:
Ralf> The problem is that any software used to build packages in a
Ralf> distribution (sid, in this case) must also be in the distribution.
Ralf> Hence, providing builds of unison produced with different ocaml
Ralf> versions implies having packages for different ocaml versions
Ralf> in sid.

That's kindof what I thought, but if I understand correctly, unison in
stretch must have been built with a different version of ocaml than the
ocaml that's actually in stretch, which confusingly contradicts this?

Indeed. Unison has been built on 2015-08-18 (on amd64). At that time, the current version of OCaml was 4.01.0. So Unison has been built with 4.01.0. It has never been rebuilt since. Maybe we should have rebuilt it at some point...

If I've gotten that right, then the current version of unison on stretch
is built with the "wrong" ocaml (i.e. not stretch's ocaml).  The idea
that it should be built with stretch's ocaml would then argue that
technically unison on stretch needs to be updated to an ocaml-4.02
build.  When that update rolls out, unison on stretch will become
incompatible with everything that it currently works with (except
itself, of course).  So a warning release note would seem appropriate
when that "upgrade" happens..?

Now that stretch is released, the only "upgrade" that can happen is a security patch. I think the best we can do is adding a NEWS item when that happens...

Care has to be taken during an upgrade of Unison, whatever the release. Maybe this should be documented... now that I see it, the README.Debian should be updated...

It would be nice if we could persuade upstream to at least give a more
helpful error message when the incompatibility arises.

It would be nice if we could persuade upstream to not rely on OCaml's marshalling functions, which is the root of the evil.


Cheers,

--
Stéphane


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