This is mostly a bug-fix release.

Get it from here:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download.html

Please let us now if you notice any problems.

Enjoy,

The Unison Team
(Trevor, Benjamin, and Jerome)

---------------------------------------------------------------

News

Changes since 2.6.1:
* The synchronization of modification times has been disabled for
directories.
* Preference files may now include lines of the form include <name>,
which will cause name.prf to be read at that point.
* The synchronization of permission between Windows and Unix now
works properly.
* A binding CYGWIN=binmode in now added to the environment so that
the Cygwin port of OpenSSH works properly in a non-Cygwin context.
* The servercmd and addversionno preferences can now be used
together: -addversionno appends an appropriate -NNN to the server
command, which is found by using the value of the -servercmd
preference if there is one, or else just unison.
* Both '-pref=val' and '-pref val' are now allowed for boolean
values. (The former can be used to set a preference to false.)
* Lot of small bugs fixed.

Changes since 2.5.31:
* The log preference is now set to true by default, since the log
file seems useful for most users.
* Several miscellaneous bugfixes (most involving symlinks).

Changes since 2.5.25:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed (again).
* Several significant bugs introduced in 2.5.25 have been fixed.

Changes since 2.5.1:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* New functionality:
+ Unison now synchronizes file modtimes, user-ids, and
group-ids.
These new features are controlled by a set of new
preferences, all of which are currently false by default.
o When the times preference is set to true, file
modification times are propaged. (Because the
representations of time may not have the same
granularity on both replicas, Unison may not always be
able to make the modtimes precisely equal, but it will
get them as close as the operating systems involved
allow.)
o When the owner preference is set to true, file ownership
information is synchronized.
o When the group preference is set to true, group
information is synchronized.
o When the numericIds preference is set to true, owner and
group information is synchronized numerically. By
default, owner and group numbers are converted to names
on each replica and these names are synchronized. (The
special user id 0 and the special group 0 are never
mapped via user/group names even if this preference is
not set.)
+ Added an integer-valued preference perms that can be used to
control the propagation of permission bits. The value of this
preference is a mask indicating which permission bits should
be synchronized. It is set by default to 0o1777: all bits but
the set-uid and set-gid bits are synchronised (synchronizing
theses latter bits can be a security hazard). If you want to
synchronize all bits, you can set the value of this
preference to -1.
+ Added a log preference (default false), which makes Unison
keep a complete record of the changes it makes to the
replicas. By default, this record is written to a file called
unison.log in the user's home directory (the value of the
HOME environment variable). If you want it someplace else,
set the logfile preference to the full pathname you want
Unison to use.
+ Added an ignorenot preference that maintains a set of
patterns for paths that should definitely not be ignored,
whether or not they match an ignore pattern. (That is, a path
will now be ignored iff it matches an ignore pattern and does
not match any ignorenot patterns.)
* User-interface improvements:
+ Roots are now displayed in the user interface in the same
order as they were given on the command line or in the
preferences file.
+ When the batch preference is set, the graphical user
interface no longer waits for user confirmation when it
displays a warning message: it simply pops up an advisory
window with a Dismiss button at the bottom and keeps on
going.
+ Added a new preference for controlling how many status
messages are printed during update detection: statusdepth
controls the maximum depth for paths on the local machine
(longer paths are not displayed, nor are non-directory
paths). The value should be an integer; default is 1.
+ Removed the trace and silent preferences. They did not seem
very useful, and there were too many preferences for
controlling output in various ways.
+ The text UI now displays just the default command (the one
that will be used if the user just types <return>) instead of
all available commands. Typing ? will print the full list of
possibilities.
+ The function that finds the canonical hostname of the local
host (which is used, for example, in calculating the name of
the archive file used to remember which files have been
synchronized) normally uses the gethostname operating system
call. However, if the environment variable
UNISONLOCALHOSTNAME is set, its value will now be used
instead. This makes it easier to use Unison in situations
where a machine's name changes frequently (e.g., because it
is a laptop and gets moved around a lot).
+ File owner and group are now displayed in the ``detail
window'' at the bottom of the screen, when unison is
configured to synchronize them.
* For hackers:
+ Updated to Jacques Garrigue's new version of lablgtk, which
means we can throw away our local patched version.
If you're compiling the GTK version of unison from sources,
you'll need to update your copy of lablgtk to the developers
release, available from
http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/soft/olabl/lablgtk.html
(Warning: installing lablgtk under Windows is currently a bit
challenging.)
+ The TODO.txt file (in the source distribution) has been
cleaned up and reorganized. The list of pending tasks should
be much easier to make sense of, for people that may want to
contribute their programming energies. There is also a
separate file BUGS.txt for open bugs.
+ The Tk user interface has been removed (it was not being
maintained and no longer compiles).
+ The debug preference now prints quite a bit of additional
information that should be useful for identifying sources of
problems.
+ The version number of the remote server is now checked right
away during the connection setup handshake, rather than
later. (Somebody sent a bug report of a server crash that
turned out to come from using inconsistent versions: better
to check this earlier and in a way that can't crash either
client or server.)
+ Unison now runs correctly on 64-bit architectures (e.g. Alpha
linux). We will not be distributing binaries for these
architectures ourselves (at least for a while) but if someone
would like to make them available, we'll be glad to provide a
link to them.
* Bug fixes:
+ Pattern matching (e.g. for ignore) is now case-insensitive
when Unison is in case-insensitive mode (i.e., when one of
the replicas is on a windows machine).
+ Some people had trouble with mysterious failures during
propagation of updates, where files would be falsely reported
as having changed during synchronization. This should be
fixed.
+ Numerous smaller fixes.

Changes since 2.4.1:
* Added a number of 'sorting modes' for the user interface. By
default, conflicting changes are displayed at the top, and the
rest of the entries are sorted in alphabetical order. This
behavior can be changed in the following ways:
+ Setting the sortnewfirst preference to true causes newly
created files to be displayed before changed files.
+ Setting sortbysize causes files to be displayed in increasing
order of size.
+ Giving the preference sortfirst=<pattern> (where <pattern> is
a path descriptor in the same format as 'ignore' and 'follow'
patterns, causes paths matching this pattern to be displayed
first.
+ Similarly, giving the preference sortlast=<pattern> causes
paths matching this pattern to be displayed last.
The sorting preferences are described in more detail in the user
manual. The sortnewfirst and sortbysize flags can also be accessed
from the 'Sort' menu in the grpahical user interface.
* Added two new preferences that can be used to change unison's
fundamental behavior to make it more like a mirroring tool instead
of a synchronizer.
+ Giving the preference prefer with argument <root> (by adding
-prefer <root> to the command line or prefer=<root>) to your
profile) means that, if there is a conflict, the contents of
<root> should be propagated to the other replica (with no
questions asked). Non-conflicting changes are treated as
usual.
+ Giving the preference force with argument <root> will make
unison resolve all differences in favor of the given root,
even if it was the other replica that was changed.
These options should be used with care! (More information is
available in the manual.)
* Small changes:
+ Changed default answer to 'Yes' in all two-button dialogs in
the graphical interface (this seems more intuitive).
+ The rsync preference has been removed (it was used to
activate rsync compression for file transfers, but rsync
compression is now enabled by default).
+ In the text user interface, the arrows indicating which
direction changes are being propagated are printed
differently when the user has overridded Unison's default
recommendation (====> instead of ---->). This matches the
behavior of the graphical interface, which displays such
arrows in a different color.
+ Carriage returns (Control-M's) are ignored at the ends of
lines in profiles, for Windows compatibility.
+ All preferences are now fully documented in the user manual.

Changes since 2.3.12:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* New/improved functionality:
+ A new preference -sortbysize controls the order in which
changes are displayed to the user: when it is set to true,
the smallest changed files are displayed first. (The default
setting is false.)
+ A new preference -sortnewfirst causes newly created files to
be listed before other updates in the user interface.
+ We now allow the ssh protocol to specify a port.
+ Incompatible change: The unison: protocol is deprecated, and
we added file: and socket:. You may have to modify your
profiles in the .unison directory. If a replica is specified
without an explicit protocol, we now assume it refers to a
file. (Previously "//saul/foo" meant to use SSH to connect to
saul, then access the foo directory. Now it means to access
saul via a remote file mechanism such as samba; the old
effect is now achieved by writing ssh://saul/foo.)
+ Changed the startup sequence for the case where roots are
given but no profile is given on the command line. The new
behavior is to use the default profile (creating it if it
does not exist), and temporarily override its roots. The
manual claimed that this case would work by reading no
profile at all, but AFAIK this was never true.
+ In all user interfaces, files with conflicts are always
listed first
+ A new preference 'sshversion' can be used to control which
version of ssh should be used to connect to the server. Legal
values are 1 and 2. (Default is empty, which will make unison
use whatever version of ssh is installed as the default 'ssh'
command.)
+ The situation when the permissions of a file was updated the
same on both side is now handled correctly (we used to report
a spurious conflict)
* Improvements for the Windows version:
+ The fact that filenames are treated case-insensitively under
Windows should now be handled correctly. The exact behavior
is described in the cross-platform section of the manual.
+ It should be possible to synchronize with Windows shares,
e.g., //host/drive/path.
+ Workarounds to the bug in syncing root directories in
Windows. The most difficult thing to fix is an ocaml bug:
Unix.opendir fails on c: in some versions of Windows.
* Improvements to the GTK user interface (the Tk interface is no
longer being maintained):
+ The UI now displays actions differently (in blue) when they
have been explicitly changed by the user from Unison's
default recommendation.
+ More colorful appearance.
+ The initial profile selection window works better.
+ If any transfers failed, a message to this effect is
displayed along with 'Synchronization complete' at the end of
the transfer phase (in case they may have scrolled off the
top).
+ Added a global progress meter, displaying the percentage of
total bytes that have been transferred so far.
* Improvements to the text user interface:
+ The file details will be displayed automatically when a
conflict is been detected.
+ when a warning is generated (e.g. for a temporary file left
over from a previous run of unison) Unison will no longer
wait for a response if it is running in -batch mode.
+ The UI now displays a short list of possible inputs each time
it waits for user interaction.
+ The UI now quits immediately (rather than looping back and
starting the interaction again) if the user presses 'q' when
asked whether to propagate changes.
+ Pressing 'g' in the text user interface will proceed
immediately with propagating updates, without asking any more
questions.
* Documentation and installation changes:
+ The manual now includes a FAQ, plus sections on common
problems and on tricks contributed by users.
+ Both the download page and the download directory explicitly
say what are the current stable and beta-test version
numbers.
+ The OCaml sources for the up-to-the-minute developers'
version (not guaranteed to be stable, or even to compile, at
any given time!) are now available from the download page.
+ Added a subsection to the manual describing cross-platform
issues (case conflicts, illegal filenames)
* Many small bug fixes and random improvements.

Changes since 2.3.1:
* Several bug fixes. The most important is a bug in the rsync module
that would occasionally cause change propagation to fail with a
'rename' error.

Changes since 2.2:
* The multi-threaded transport system is now disabled by default.
(It is not stable enough yet.)
* Various bug fixes.
* A new experimental feature:
The final component of a -path argument may now be the wildcard
specifier *. When Unison sees such a path, it expands this path on
the client into into the corresponding list of paths by listing
the contents of that directory.
Note that if you use wildcard paths from the command line, you
will probably need to use quotes or a backslash to prevent the *
from being interpreted by your shell.
If both roots are local, the contents of the first one will be
used for expanding wildcard paths. (Nb: this is the first one
after the canonization step -- i.e., the one that is listed first
in the user interface -- not the one listed first on the command
line or in the preferences file.)

Changes since 2.1:
* The transport subsystem now includes an implementation by Sylvain
Gommier and Norman Ramsey of Tridgell and Mackerras's rsync
protocol. This protocol achieves much faster transfers when only a
small part of a large file has been changed by sending just diffs.
This feature is mainly helpful for transfers over slow links---on
fast local area networks it can actually degrade performance---so
we have left it off by default. Start unison with the -rsync
option (or put rsync=true in your preferences file) to turn it on.
* ``Progress bars'' are now diplayed during remote file transfers,
showing what percentage of each file has been transferred so far.
* The version numbering scheme has changed. New releases will now be
have numbers like 2.2.30, where the second component is
incremented on every significant public release and the third
component is the ``patch level.''
* Miscellaneous improvements to the GTK-based user interface.
* The manual is now available in PDF format.
* We are experimenting with using a multi-threaded transport
subsystem to transfer several files at the same time, making much
more effective use of available network bandwidth. This feature is
not completely stable yet, so by default it is disabled in the
release version of Unison.
If you want to play with the multi-threaded version, you'll need
to recompile Unison from sources (as described in the
documentation), setting the THREADS flag in Makefile.OCaml to
true. Make sure that your OCaml compiler has been installed with
the -with-pthreads configuration option. (You can verify this by
checking whether the file threads/threads.cma in the OCaml
standard library directory contains the string -lpthread near the
end.)

Changes since 1.292:
* Reduced memory footprint (this is especially important during the
first run of unison, where it has to gather information about all
the files in both repositories).
* Fixed a bug that would cause the socket server under NT to fail
after the client exits.
* Added a SHIFT modifier to the Ignore menu shortcut keys in GTK
interface (to avoid hitting them accidentally).

Changes since 1.231:
* Tunneling over ssh is now supported in the Windows version. See
the installation section of the manual for detailed instructions.
* The transport subsystem now includes an implementation of the
rsync protocol, built by Sylvain Gommier and Norman Ramsey. This
protocol achieves much faster transfers when only a small part of
a large file has been changed by sending just diffs. The rsync
feature is off by default in the current version. Use the -rsync
switch to turn it on. (Nb. We still have a lot of tuning to do:
you may not notice much speedup yet.)
* We're experimenting with a multi-threaded transport subsystem,
written by Jerome Vouillon. The downloadable binaries are still
single-threaded: if you want to try the multi-threaded version,
you'll need to recompile from sources. (Say make THREADS=true.)
Native thread support from the compiler is required. Use the
option -threads N to select the maximal number of concurrent
threads (default is 5). Multi-threaded and single-threaded
clients/servers can interoperate.
* A new GTK-based user interface is now available, thanks to Jacques
Garrigue. The Tk user interface still works, but we'll be shifting
development effort to the GTK interface from now on.
* OCaml 3.00 is now required for compiling Unison from sources. The
modules uitk and myfileselect have been changed to use labltk
instead of camltk. To compile the Tk interface in Windows, you
must have ocaml-3.00 and tk8.3. When installing tk8.3, put it in
c:\Tcl rather than the suggested c:\Program Files\Tcl, and be sure
to install the headers and libraries (which are not installed by
default).
* Added a new -addversionno switch, which causes unison to use
unison-<currentversionnumber> instead of just unison as the remote
server command. This allows multiple versions of unison to coexist
conveniently on the same server: whichever version is run on the
client, the same version will be selected on the server.

Changes since 1.219:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* This version fixes several annoying bugs, including:
+ Some cases where propagation of file permissions was not
working.
+ umask is now ignored when creating directories
+ directories are create writable, so that a read-only
directory and its contents can be propagated.
+ Handling of warnings generated by the server.
+ Synchronizing a path whose parent is not a directory on both
sides is now flagged as erroneous.
+ Fixed some bugs related to symnbolic links and nonexistant
roots.
o When a change (deletion or new contents) is propagated
onto a 'follow'ed symlink, the file pointed to by the
link is now changed. (We used to change the link itself,
which doesn't fit our assertion that 'follow' means the
link is completely invisible)
o When one root did not exist, propagating the other root
on top of it used to fail, becuase unison could not
calculate the working directory into which to write
changes. This should be fixed.
* A human-readable timestamp has been added to Unison's archive
files.
* The semantics of Path and Name regular expressions now correspond
better.
* Some minor improvements to the text UI (e.g. a command for going
back to previous items)
* The organization of the export directory has changed --- should be
easier to find / download things now.

Changes since 1.200:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* This version has not been tested extensively on Windows.
* Major internal changes designed to make unison safer to run at the
same time as the replicas are being changed by the user.
* Internal performance improvements.

Changes since 1.190:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* A number of internal functions have been changed to reduce the
amount of memory allocation, especially during the first
synchronization. This should help power users with very big
replicas.
* Reimplementation of low-level remote procedure call stuff, in
preparation for adding rsync-like smart file transfer in a later
release.
* Miscellaneous bug fixes.

Changes since 1.180:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Archive format has changed. Make sure you
synchronize your replicas before upgrading, to avoid spurious
conflicts. The first sync after upgrading will be slow.
* Fixed some small bugs in the interpretation of ignore patterns.
* Fixed some problems that were preventing the Windows version from
working correctly when click-started.
* Fixes to treatment of file permissions under Windows, which were
causing spurious reports of different permissions when
synchronizing between windows and unix systems.
* Fixed one more non-tail-recursive list processing function, which
was causing stack overflows when synchronizing very large
replicas.

Changes since 1.169:
* The text user interface now provides commands for ignoring files.
* We found and fixed some more non-tail-recursive list processing
functions. Some power users have reported success with very large
replicas.
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: Files ending in .tmp are no longer ignored
automatically. If you want to ignore such files, put an
appropriate ignore pattern in your profile.
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: The syntax of ignore and follow patterns has
changed. Instead of putting a line of the form

ignore = <regexp>
in your profile (.unison/default.prf), you should put:

ignore = Regexp <regexp>
Moreover, two other styles of pattern are also recognized:

ignore = Name <name>
matches any path in which one component matches <name>, while

ignore = Path <path>
matches exactly the path <path>.
Standard ``globbing'' conventions can be used in <name> and
<path>:
+ a ? matches any single character except /
+ a * matches any sequence of characters not including /
+ [xyz] matches any character from the set {x, y, z }
+ {a,bb,ccc} matches any one of a, bb, or ccc.
See the user manual for some examples.

Changes since 1.146:
* Some users were reporting stack overflows when synchronizing huge
directories. We found and fixed some non-tail-recursive list
processing functions, which we hope will solve the problem. Please
give it a try and let us know.
* Major additions to the documentation.

Changes since 1.142:
* Major internal tidying and many small bugfixes.
* Major additions to the user manual.
* Unison can now be started with no arguments -- it will prompt
automatically for the name of a profile file containing the roots
to be synchronized. This makes it possible to start the graphical
UI from a desktop icon.
* Fixed a small bug where the text UI on NT was raising a 'no such
signal' exception.

Changes since 1.139:
* The precompiled windows binary in the last release was compiled
with an old OCaml compiler, causing propagation of permissions not
to work (and perhaps leading to some other strange behaviors we've
heard reports about). This has been corrected. If you're using
precompiled binaries on Windows, please upgrade.
* Added a -debug command line flag, which controls debugging of
various modules. Say -debug XXX to enable debug tracing for module
XXX, or -debug all to turn on absolutely everything.
* Fixed a small bug where the text UI on NT was raising a 'no such
signal' exception.

Changes since 1.111:
* INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: The names and formats of the preference files
in the .unison directory have changed. In particular:
+ the file ``prefs'' should be renamed to default.prf
+ the contents of the file ``ignore'' should be merged into
default.prf. Each line of the form REGEXP in ignore should
become a line of the form ignore = REGEXP in default.prf.
* Unison now handles permission bits and symbolic links. See the
manual for details.
* You can now have different preference files in your .unison
directory. If you start unison like this

unison profilename
(i.e. with just one ``anonymous'' command-line argument), then the
file ~/.unison/profilename.prf will be loaded instead of
default.prf.
* Some improvements to terminal handling in the text user interface
* Added a switch -killServer that terminates the remote server
process when the unison client is shutting down, even when using
sockets for communication. (By default, a remote server created
using ssh/rsh is terminated automatically, while a socket server
is left running.)
* When started in 'socket server' mode, unison prints 'server
started' on stderr when it is ready to accept connections. (This
may be useful for scripts that want to tell when a socket-mode
server has finished initalization.)
* We now make a nightly mirror of our current internal development
tree, in case anyone wants an up-to-the-minute version to hack
around with.
* Added a file CONTRIB with some suggestions for how to help us make
Unison better.