Hi Stéphane, Thanks for your response.
By this: > > Possibly some pressure should be put on upstream to (1) catch the > > relevant exception and flag the ocaml version dependency, I meant that since this is such a non-obvious failure, which should never happen normally (I've never seen a unison data stream corrupted in probably fifteen years of using it), that it might be reasonable and helpful to catch the exception caused by the serialisation change and to add a message saying "This exception may be because the two versions of unison were compiled with different versions of OCaml", with a reference to some relevant documentation (e.g. bug report or release notes). -- I'm unfamiliar with how the Debian release process works internally, and minimising the work involved in packaging unison is of course essential — you're already saving all Debian users a huge amount of work by packaging it, so thank you for that. At the moment because you're building with ocaml-4.01, the published unison is backwards compatible but not forwards compatible; can you continue to build unison with 4.01 now that Debian's on ocaml-4.02, or is that going to become difficult as well? My initial thought process was that producing two conflicting ocaml builds, say ocaml_pre_402-4.01.0 and ocaml-4.04.2 (or whatever the actual versions are), which could *not* be installed simultaneously, would have been the easiest route to automatically building multiple versions of unison on some kind of automated build farm (including the ocaml version in unison package names), but that's probably because I don't understand what the actual release process is like. So if two ocaml versions is not a practical way of proceeding, do you think there's any reasonable way of producing pre- and post-402 releases of unison for Debian in the future? If not, then would it be possible to include a release note (the kind that you get shown and emailed when you upgrade) warning users about the incompatibility? I realise that arguably this note should not yet have been sent since Debian's unison is still backwards compatible; perhaps you already have it planned for the -4.02 changeover.. Regards, Conrad
