[Unison-hackers] New stable release of Unison (2.48)
Benjamin C. Pierce
bcpierce at cis.upenn.edu
Thu Feb 12 10:50:42 EST 2015
Dear Unison community,
As a little Valentine's present to all of you, we’ve packaged up a new stable release of Unison. It can be found here:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download.html
Precompiled versions and updates to various package managers will appear in due course.
Best,
- Benjamin
Changes since 2.45:
* Incorporated a patch from Christopher Zimmermann to replace the
Uprintf module (which doesn't work with OCaml 4.02, causing Unison
to crash) with equivalent functionality from the standard library.
* Incorporated a refresh of the OSX GUI, contributed by Alan Shutko.
* Added a maxsizethreshold option, which prevents the transfer of
files larger than the size specified (in Kb).
* Added a "copyonconflict" preference, to make a copy of files that
would otherwise be overwritten or deleted in case of conflicting
changes. (This makes it possible to automatically resolve conflicts
in a fairly safe way when synchronizing continuously, in
combination with the "repeat = watch" and "prefer = newer"
preferences.
* File system monitoring:
+ The file watcher now fails when unable to watch a directory,
rather than silently ignoring the issue.
+ File system monitoring: more robust communication with the
helper program (in socket mode, the unison server will still
work properly despite unexpected unison client
disconnections).
+ A bytecode version of unison-fsmonitor is now produced by
"make NATIVE=false"
+ Improved search for unison-fsmonitor
+ Detect when the helper process exits.
+ More robust file watching helper programs for Windows and
Linux. They communicate with Unison through pipes (Unison
redirects stdin and stdout), using a race-free protocol.
+ Retries paths with failures using an exponential backoff
algorithm.
+ The information returned by the file watchers are used
independently for each replica; thus, when only one replica
has changes, Unison will only rescan this replica.
+ When available, used by the graphical UIs to speed up
rescanning (can be disabled by setting the new watch
preference to
+ Small fix to the way fsmonitor.py gets invoked when using the
file watching functionality, suggested by Josh Berdine. Unison
will now look for fsmonitor.py in the same directory where the
Unison executable itself lives.
* Minor:
+ Fixed a bug in export procedure that was messing up
documentation strings.
+ Incorporated a patch from Irányossy Knoblauch Artúr to make
temp file names fit within 143 characters (to make eCryptFS
happy).
+ Added a string to the Conflict direction to document the
reason of the conflict.
+ Log conflicts and problems in the text UI even if nothing is
propagated.
+ Use hash function from OCaml 3.x for comparing archives, even
when compiled with OCaml 4.x.
+ Do not restart Unison in case of uncaught exception when the
repeat preference is set. This seems safer. And it does not
work, for instance, in case of lost connection.
+ Fix Unix.readlink invalid argument error under Windows
+ Fix a crash when the output of the diff program is too large.
+ Fixed Makefile for cross-compiling towards Windows (updated to
MinGW-w64)
Changes since 2.40.63:
* New preference fastercheckUNSAFE, which can be used (with care!) to
achieve much faster update detection when all the common files in
the two replicas are known to be identical. See the manual for more
information.
This feature should still be considered experimental, but it's
ready for other people to try out.
* Added option clientHostName. If specified, it will be used to as
the client host name, overriding UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME and the actual
host name.
* OS X GUI:
+ fix crash under Lion, because of problems with the toolbar,
using the fix suggested in
http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=95778.
+ uimacnew09 is now the standard graphical interface on OSX
+ A small improvement to the uimacnew09 interface from Alan
Schmitt and Steve Kalkwarf: when Unison is run with the -batch
flag, the interface will now automatically propagate changes
and terminate, without waiting for user interaction.
+ Show a modal warning window if there is no archive for the
hosts. The user can then choose to exit or proceed (proceed is
the default). The window is not shown if the batch preference
is true.
+ file details panel selectable
* GTK GUI:
+ New version of uigtk2.ml from Matt Zagrabelny that reorganizes
the icons in a slightly more intuitive way.
* Minor fixes:
+ Setting the prefer preference to older or newer now propagates
deletions when there is no conflict.
+ Correctly quote the path when running merge commands.
+ Add quotes to paths when calling external file watcher
utility.
+ Incorporate a patch to fsmonitor.py (the external filewatcher
utility) from Tomasz Zernicki to make it work better under
Windows.
+ Incorporated new version of fsmonitor.py from Christophe Gohle
+ Fixed incompatibility with OpenSSH 5.6.
+ Fixed fingerprint cache: do not cache file properties
+ Some spelling corrections in documentation and comments from
Stephane Glondu
+ Fixed O_APPEND mode for open under Windows
+ Fixed String.sub invalid argument error when an AppleDouble
file does not contain a finder information field
+ Trim duplicate paths when using "-repeat watch"
+ Unison now passes path arguments and -follow directives to
fsmonitor.py. This seems to work except for one small issue
with how fsmonitor.py treats -follow directives for
directories that don't exist (or maybe this is an issue with
how it treats any kind of monitoring when the thing being
monitored doesn't exist?). If we create a symlink to a
nonexistant directory, give Unison (hence fsmonitor.py) a
'follow' directive for the symlink, start unison, and then
create the directory, fsmonitor.py misses the change.
+ Lines added in profile files by unison always start at a new
line
Changes since 2.40.1:
* Added "BelowPath" patterns, that match a path as well as all paths
below (convenient to use with nodeletion,update,creationpartial
preferences)
* Added a "fat" preference that makes Unison use the right options
when one of the replica is on a FAT filesystem.
* Allow "prefer/force=newer" even when not synchronizing modification
times. (The reconciler will not be aware of the modification time
of unchanged files, so the synchronization choices of Unison can be
different from when "times=true", but the behavior remains sane:
changed files with the most recent modification time will be
propagated.)
* Minor fixes and improvements:
+ Compare filenames up to decomposition in case sensitive mode
when one host is running MacOSX and the unicode preference is
set to true.
+ Rsync: somewhat faster compressor
+ Make Unicode the default on all architectures (it was only the
default when a Mac OS X or Windows machine was involved).
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.
For older changes, see the user manual.
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