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 going is a pain to say the least.
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 from another system without crashing.
Drove me crazy.
Oh, so OCaml is a toy language from academics. I've read so many good things about it over the years, but no one mentioned that aspect of it. There should be a law about putting a warning in Big Red Letters on the box so someone doesn't make the mistake of using it in a large, long lived project.
What? Why did you conclude so?
> but no one mentioned that aspect of it.
Really? Did you open the documentation? It's stated explicitly.
https://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/Marshal.h...
> There should be a law about putting a warning in Big Red Letters on the box so someone doesn't make the mistake of using it in a large, long lived project.
It's documented, and it's not intended to be used for serialization, you use it in very particular cases, for example for faster object sharing with IPC for multicore. We use Json or S-expressions or other stuff for that purposes.
I really don't know why unison people don't switch to a proper serialization.
My use-case is that I run Unison on two computers running Fedora, to implement a form of "sneakernet" file sync. Work computer <-> usb thumb drive <-> home computer.
I wasn't aware that the exact version of Unison was so important. Will start paying attention to that.
Ouch! FWIW, Thanks for all your work.
On Fedora I'm using unison251-text from the croadfeldt/Unison COPR. On Gentoo it's net-misc/unison-2.51.2, on FreeBSD it's unison-nox11-2.51.2 from pkg.
But you package for Fedora, which is "upstream" for RHEL (if I'm not mistaken) with their 10 year life cycles, so I'm sure RHEL customers would love you to keep as many versions available as possible :)