Re: Need some advice as a user impacted by the retirement of the Unison package

[Richard W.M. Jones]

[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
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