Re: Need some advice as a user impacted by the retirement of the Unison package
[Anonymously forwarding this to devel mailing list]
First, thank you for having maintained the Unison packages in Fedora
for years, as I suppose keeping it compatible with other distros (or
even with Fedora itself) through OCaml version nonsense must not
have been particularly fun. You have been doing a great service to
the public in doing so.
Unison has been the only dependable 2-way P2P-with-SFTP file synch
tool I've used for 15+ years. As clunky as it felt, I've never found
an alternative that even tries to do what it does (two way,
peer-to-peer, and providing control to the user to review changes
before syncing). My whole daily life/workflow depends on it, to keep
my laptop and desktop's data in sync for many folders in different
locations.
I discovered your announcement regarding the retirement of the
Unison packages, when wanting to upgrade from Fedora 33 to F34 this
summer.
As you can imagine, this is a blocker for me, and I feel trapped. I
have no packaging experience and I really don't expect to be making
this thing work by myself on tarballs. Currently my machines are
stuck/frozen to Fedora 33, but I know my days are numbered in there,
because within months F33 will be declared EoL. Hence why I'm
emailing ahead of that time.
I saw the three issues pinned at the top of their tracker that all
seem to be about the problem you have been facing with ocaml. It's
unclear to me how quickly they would resolve them given the
apparently glacial pace of unison development, there seem to be pull
requests but I don't have the kind of knowledge to be able to tell
how close to being done they are.
So I have two questions:
• Do you ever realistically expect Unison to make a comeback in
Fedora's RPM/ DNF repositories, or is it not going to happen in
this decade? Heck, even if it was something like "We're not
maintaining multi-versions / compatibility with other distros"
and it is expected to work only "across the same version of
Fedora" that would be fine with me, I could live with that.
• If not, are there any reasonable alternatives to be able to
install Unison in Fedora in the future? (I didn't see flatpaks
for it, and I doubt those would work anyway)
As an occasional open-source contributor (typically not through code
or packaging, though), I have been using Fedora as my only desktop
platform since 2010 (particularly to stay close to vanilla/upstream
GNOME). I love it, and I really really really don't want to be
distro-hopping again. I feel like there is no alternative to Fedora,
and I don't know what I will do if it turns out that F33 is EoL and
there is no more path forward for unison users on Fedora
Workstation. Yet Unison is too critical to my workflow, and if
backed against the wall, I might have to try to find a new
workstation platform (I don't know which), and I really don't want
to come to that. Yeah, I realize how ridiculous that must sound;
it's not a threat though, it's just a statement of how distressed I
feel about this.
Sorry for the long email from a stranger. I don't know who else to
turn to for advice about this on this particular issue. Is there
hope from something I haven't noticed in this whole picture? The
current situation is a bit unclear to me.
The answer is that if the package is important to you then you should
step up to maintain it. In this case it really needs someone to work
on it upstream.
Rich.
--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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