> It is bad design if you need to install 10 version at the same time > only to be able to access several different servers. Why don't they > include support for every know server in the clients? Shouldn't be > too hard even recognizing the version of the server during runtime? > Then I would install always *one* version at a time and as long > there is no newer server I would be able to access any unison server.
You won't get any argument from me about that. I agree, it was a bad design decision. This problem has been discussed at length on the unison-hackers list; see the thread beginning at http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/pipermail/unison-hackers/2005-June/000118.html if you want the details. I pointed out that the version incompatibility forces me to create a new package for every version, if I want to enable Cygwin users to synchronize with servers running any of the recent declared stable and beta releases of Unison. The developers acknowledged the problem, and made a partial step to alleviating it by reorganizing the version numbering. Now instead of all versions with different version numbers being incompatible, versions are compatible iff the first two numbers in their version string are the same. This is only a partial improvement, but it's all we're likely to get for now. I don't see this problem going away any time soon, because the old versions will be around for quite a while yet. Debian stable, for example, which has just recently been released, includes Unison 2.9.1-- the oldest of the packages currently available in Cygwin. But the good news is that those old packages don't require any maintenance; they just take up space in the package repositories. And once Debian stable gets updated, I'll probably declare that no one is (or should be) running the oldest versions any more, and remove them from Cygwin. Andrew.
