[Unison-hackers] Re: a common patch set - first attempt [repost]

[Benjamin Pierce]

> This is the nub of the problem for me as a packager.  The reality is
> that many sites and even OSes are slow to upgrade from old versions.  
> Debian, for example, until very recently only offered version 2.9.1. 
>  It
> now also offers 2.10.2, but only in unstable; the stable (Sarge) and
> testing versions are both 2.9.1, and Sarge, having just been released,
> is going to be with us for a long time.  
>
> Now because of Unison's version constraints, if a user wants to
> synchronize with a server running 2.9.1, then their only choices are to
> either run 2.9.1 on their client, or else build and install a later
> version themselves on their server.  For me as a packager, the whole
> point of providing a package is to save people the work of having to
> build and install their own versions.  So, in order to allow Cygwin
> users to synchronize with servers running old versions, I have to
> package those versions for Cygwin.  This is why Cygwin now includes 
> four
> Unison packages: unison2.9.1, unison2.9.20, unison2.10.2, and
> unison2.12.0.

Sigh.

One other thing this discussion makes clear is that we probably need 
some way of naming revisions of particular version numbers, so that 
it's clear when someone reports a bug which patches they are running 
with.  E.g., we could include the subversion revision number of the 
latest commit for that branch in the information printed by 'unison 
-v'.

    - Benjamin