[Unison-hackers] Proposed mode for unison: "Salvage"

[Benjamin Pierce]

This would take some hacking - in particular, I'm not sure I see how  
the user interface should work (especially the graphical one).  But I  
agree that unison would be a decent base for building such a tool.

        - Benjamin

On Jan 5, 2010, at 9:54 AM, Ryan Newton <newton at mit.edu> wrote:

> The biggest complaint I hear from friends and family about unison is
> the ease of duplicating files.  This happens most often when running
> unison without saved archives (e.g. because things get moved around,
> mixed up, moved to new machines, etc).
>
> A typical scenario that is difficult to handle with unison is that you
> come across an old copy of folder X that *might* contain something
> that you forgot to extract or move into your current, primary copy.
> But of course you don't know what's there and checking is manually
> hard.  Further, performing a simple unison is the WRONG answer,
> because the organization may have changed substantially, making it
> very hard to tell if supposedly new files in the old copy are really
> new or have just been moved (duplication danger).
>
> In this case it would be very useful to run unison in mode where:
>
>  (1) only copies from old->new are considered.  The goal is not two
> identical archives, but to retrieve things from the old copy.
>  (2) only files which do not exist ANYWHERE in the new archive are
> considered, the new archive is just a flat set of files for the
> purpose of this check.
>
> Secondary questions include where to put the new files (presumably the
> same path as in the old archive) and what to do with
> conflicts/collisions resulting from, for example, modified files
> (presumably they're treated in the normal unison way).
>
> The interface could perhaps be a "-salvage X" flag, where X is one of
> the roots (just like -force).
>
> Best,
> -Ryan
>
> P.S. I actually wrote a separate tool at some point (in ocaml) that
> could accomplish the above which I could provide to the curious.  Its
> goal was to replace all the files in a folder X, that exist in a
> folder Y, with symlinks into folder Y.  One could run this on the old
> archive and then use "find" to see all the files that were not turned
> to symlinks.  However, I think leveraging unison for this purpose
> would be much more desirable.
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