[Unison-hackers] Unison 2.40.1 -- beta release candidate
Benjamin Pierce
bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu
Sun Feb 21 09:29:35 EST 2010
Dear Unison Hackers,
I've just packaged up a new beta release version of Unison
incorporating the last few months of changes. Before I announce it to
the world, I'd like your help checking that everything is working --
in particular, that it compiles on all the usual platforms.
Thanks,
- Benjamin
Download address:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download.html
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 transfered 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 ressource: 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.
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