Dear users of Unison,

I'm pleased to announce a new beta-release, version 2.32. This
version fixes a few issues in the old beta-release (2.31). If no new
issues emerge in the next few weeks, it will be promoted to an
official stable version.

As usual, a big round of thanks to everybody who contributes their
time to helping maintain and improve Unison, and a special thanks to
all the people that share their expertise on the unison-users mailing
list...

Enjoy,

- Benjamin

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

Changes since 2.31:
* Minor fixes and improvements:
+ Ignore one hour differences when deciding whether a file
may
have been updated. This avoids slow update detection after
daylight saving time changes under Windows. This makes
Unison
slightly more likely to miss an update, but it should be
safe
enough.
+ Fix a small bug that was affecting mainly windows users. We
need to commit the archives at the end of the sync even if
there are no updates to propagate because some files (in
fact, if we've just switched to DST on windows, a LOT of
files) might have new modtimes in the archive. (Changed the
text UI only. It's less clear where to change the GUI.)
+ Don't delete the temp file when a transfer fails due to a
fingerprint mismatch (so that we can have a look and see
why!) We've also added more debugging code to give more
informative error messages when we encounter the dreaded
and
longstanding "assert failed during file transfer" bug

Changes since 2.27:
* If Unison is interrupted during a directory transfer, it will
now
leave the partially transferred directory intact in a temporary
location. (This maintains the invariant that new files/
directories
are transferred either completely or not at all.) The next time
Unison is run, it will continue filling in this temporary
directory, skipping transferring files that it finds are already
there.
* We've added experimental support for invoking an external file
transfer tool for whole-file copies instead of Unison's built-in
transfer protocol. Three new preferences have been added:
+ copyprog is a string giving the name (and command-line
switches, if needed) of an external program that can be
used
to copy large files efficiently. By default, rsync is
invoked, but other tools such as scp can be used instead by
changing the value of this preference. (Although this is
not
its primary purpose, rsync is actually a pretty fast way of
copying files that don't already exist on the receiving
host.) For files that do already exist on (but that have
been
changed in one replica), Unison will always use its built-
in
implementation of the rsync algorithm.
+ Added a "copyprogrest" preference, so that we can give
different command lines for invoking the external copy
utility depending on whether a partially transferred file
already exists or not. (Rsync doesn't seem to care about
this, but other utilities may.)
+ copythreshold is an integer (-1 by default), indicating
above
what filesize (in megabytes) Unison should use the external
copying utility specified by copyprog. Specifying 0 will
cause ALL copies to use the external program; a negative
number will prevent any files from using it. (Default is
-1.)
Thanks to Alan Schmitt for a huge amount of hacking and to an
anonymous sponsor for suggesting and underwriting this
extension.
* Small improvements:
+ Added a new preference, dontchmod. By default, Unison uses
the chmod system call to set the permission bits of files
after it has copied them. But in some circumstances (and
under some operating systems), the chmod call always fails.
Setting this preference completely prevents Unison from
ever
calling chmod.
+ Don't ignore files that look like backup files if the
backuplocation preference is set to central
+ Shortened the names of several preferences. The old names
are
also still supported, for backwards compatibility, but they
do not appear in the documentation.
+ Lots of little documentation tidying. (In particular,
preferences are separated into Basic and Advanced! This
should hopefully make Unison a little more approachable for
new users.
+ Unison can sometimes fail to transfer a file, giving the
unhelpful message "Destination updated during
synchronization" even though the file has not been changed.
This can be caused by programs that change either the
file's
contents or the file's extended attributes without changing
its modification time. It's not clear what is the best fix
for this - it is not Unison's fault, but it makes Unison's
behavior puzzling - but at least Unison can be more helpful
about suggesting a workaround (running once with fastcheck
set to false). The failure message has been changed to give
this advice.
+ Many improvements to the OS X GUI (thanks to Alan Schmitt
and
Craig Federighi), including a very nice new "nested
directory" display style and per-file progress bars.
* Very preliminary support for triggering Unison from an external
filesystem-watching utility. The current implementation is very
simple, not efficient, and almost completely untested--not ready
for real users. But if someone wants to help improve it (e.g.,
by
writing a filesystem watcher for your favorite OS), please make
yourself known!
On the Unison side, the new behavior is very simple:
+ use the text UI
+ start Unison with the command-line flag "-repeat FOO",
where
FOO is name of a file where Unison should look for
notifications of changes
+ when it starts up, Unison will read the whole contents of
this file (on both hosts), which should be a
newline-separated list of paths (relative to the root of
the
synchronization) and synchronize just these paths, as if it
had been started with the "-path=xxx" option for each one
of
them
+ when it finishes, it will sleep for a few seconds and then
examine the watchfile again; if anything has been added, it
will read the new paths, synchronize them, and go back to
sleep
+ that's it!
To use this to drive Unison "incrementally," just start it in
this
mode and start up a tool (on each host) to watch for new changes
to the filesystem and append the appropriate paths to the
watchfile. Hopefully such tools should not be too hard to write.
* Bug fixes:
+ Fixed a bug that was causing new files to be created with
permissions 0x600 instead of using a reasonable default
(like
0x644), if the 'perms' flag was set to 0. (Bug reported by
Ben Crowell.)
+ Follow maxthreads preference when transferring directories.