unison formal review

[Tom Callaway]

On 09/28/2011 11:00 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> I checked the source code, and unison sends a header which contains
> the current major version number of the software (where "major
> version" is a string, currently "2.40").  If the major versions of
> each end don't exactly match, unison aborts.  It would be possible,
> albeit complicated, to combine all versions of unison together somehow
> and switch on the major version.

Well, while I admit that merging all the various unison protocols into a
single binary is a non-trivial task, especially if upstream isn't
interested in that level of change, it might be possible to do something
like this:

Write a simple program which simply asks the other end to establish a
connection for the sole purpose of detecting the major version string,
then attempts to call out for a binary that could be used to actually
establish that connection. It could also do connection caching so that
only the first query attempt is necessary, future attempts would simply
pull the known type from the cache and use that, only if that failed
would it fall back to running detection.

This way, we could continue with the separate packages for older
versions of unison, with this "smart" binary in the main, current
package. If the smart binary can't find a compat version that it needs,
it can prompt the user to install "unisonNNN".

~tom

==
Fedora Project