The Development Status section of the manual mentions a follow-on project called Boomerang¹. It looks like the GitHub repo² only had activity for about 2 years, then stopped. Is that a dead project?
Unison File Synchronizer
41–50 of 102 posts
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a maintainer of the Unison package in Fedora and I'd love to know which version(s) of Unison you use day to day. In Fedora (and I think this applies in Debian too) we have to maintain 3 versions because Unison isn't interoperable across minor releases. For this reason we package 2.13, 2.27 and 2.40, and I think there is discussion about packaging the latest release too. Keeping these ancient (esp 2.13) versions g…
This incompatibility is one of the reasons why I reduced my dependency on it, though I still use it for minor things. The last straw came when it turns out that unison was incompatible with the same version, if that version had been built on a different system. I can't remember the details but there was some library version difference that results in a unison that has the same version number but wouldn't talk to one…
An ugly way around it is to compile your own version of unison. The good news, if I remember correctly, is that the binary can be built in one place and copied around to the other hosts (and say put in $HOME/bin.)
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#43Daily user since beginning of this year. Help keeps my laptop in sync with my remote dev environment.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
This incompatibility is one of the reasons why I reduced my dependency on it, though I still use it for minor things. The last straw came when it turns out that unison was incompatible with the same version, if that version had been built on a different system. I can't remember the details but there was some library version difference that results in a unison that has the same version number but wouldn't talk to one…
An ugly way around it is to compile your own version of unison. The good news, if I remember correctly, is that the binary can be built in one place and copied around to the other hosts (and say put in $HOME/bin.)
I was syncing between OS X and FreeBSD, so sharing a binary wasn't possible.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#45Not to be confused with Panic's Usenet/NNTP client: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(Usenet_client)
Nor with the Coda replicating filesystem, which is not to be confused with Panic’s code editor of the same name.
They sold the name and it’s called Nova from now on btw
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#46How difficult would it be to build a Dropbox clone on top of this?
I remember being surprised when I found references to Unison in the Dropbox Linux client. This was in the early days, I'm quite sure they rewrote it since. It would be cool to get the full story from a Dropbox employee.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty hard. Unison is nice, but... - Unison is written in OCaml, which is (probably) a perfectly fine language but not commonly used - Unison synchronizes files to files, but for a Dropbox-like system you really want deduplication for space savings (i.e. server-side storage is a bunch of pointers to content-addressed blocks.) - in general, it's not clear to me that the client is really the hard part of Dropbox. Note…
> - Unison synchronizes files to files, but for a Dropbox-like system you really want deduplication for space savings (i.e. server-side storage is a bunch of pointers to content-addressed blocks.) > - in general, it's not clear to me that the client is really the hard part of Dropbox. Note e.g. the part where Dropbox now runs its own data centers for cost reasons. The whole point of Unison is that you do not need a s…
Erm, with pairwise syncing you still want a "server". I've used unison as my primarily file syncing for a decade, and trying to maintain a spanning tree among partially-available nodes/disks is a pain in the ass. And creating loops means you can't rely on file deletions.
I agree it doesn't have to be a corporate-owned, or even corporate-snoopable "cloud" server, and if this is your goal then unison will work well. Also you can trivially solve the dedup using zfs, but I don't think dedup is a killer feature for personal storage.
(Better would be a "manual dedup" utility to catch those instances where you copied off the same thing multiple times over the years. I'd appreciate any recommendations here, although writing one seems trivial when I get around to it - calculate recursive sha256sums for every node in the filesystem tree, and look for the biggest matching ones)
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#48Is this project still going? I used to use it a lot for duplicating my project directories between my lap PC and my home PC. It was so powerful and so useful at the time. Honestly I thought it had died. I use Syncthing now. It's really useful.
Unison suffers from the Lisp Curse - it's written in OCaml, a similarly powerful but small-audience language. It "just works", so there doesn't need to be much activity.
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#49Is this project still going? I used to use it a lot for duplicating my project directories between my lap PC and my home PC. It was so powerful and so useful at the time. Honestly I thought it had died. I use Syncthing now. It's really useful.
Unison suffers from the Lisp Curse - it's written in OCaml, a similarly powerful but small-audience language. It "just works", so there doesn't need to be much activity.
Absolutely, I have a entry in my journal about wanting to rewrite Unison in C. Never got around to it, but it would still be fun. The same goes with Wings 3D, cool app, but Erlang? Really?
Re: Unison File Synchronizer
#50Is this project still going? I used to use it a lot for duplicating my project directories between my lap PC and my home PC. It was so powerful and so useful at the time. Honestly I thought it had died. I use Syncthing now. It's really useful.
I used Unison to sync between two laptops. In using only one laptop now and I switched to Syncthing to sync some folders of my phone, tablets and laptop. Unfortunately Unison doesn't run on Android. I liked the way it could perform a merge of the folders from different computers.