[Unison-hackers] Interface for an external GUI

[Michael von Glasow]

Hi all,

After a decade of using Unison, it might be time for me to start 
tinkering, as I realize that Unison is missing an Android port. (I did 
find one, but it seems to be proprietary and, judging by the 
screenshots, has lots of room for improvement.)

Since I have little knowledge of OCaml, much less of OCaml on Android, 
my approach to an Android port would be to build a pure Android GUI that 
calls the native Unison binary for all the backend work. I see two 
possible options to accomplish this:

Option 1: recompile the Unison binary (with only the text UI) for 
Android and call that from the GUI.

Option 2: run the code through ocamlcc (converting it into C code), 
rework it into a library that exports the necessary functions for the 
GUI, and call that from the GUI via JNI or JNA.

Has anyone ever tried one of these two and can share their experience? 
What did you get to work, what did not work?

As for option 1, can I run the binary in a sort of backend mode that 
supports interactive operation – scan for differences, display 
differences, let user choose how to resolve differences and start 
synchronization, then synchronize – while keeping track of files and 
skipping those which get modified during synchronization? This would 
probably entail multiple calls to the binary – once to collect the 
differences, then to sync them according to the user’s choice – any way 
to do this?

Any input is appreciated. No guarantees anything useful will ever come 
out of it, though.

Michael