unison formal review

[Gregor Tätzner]

Am Freitag, 30. September 2011, 11:10:27 schrieb 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.

so many creative ideas ;)

But I think such a program would be confusing to users: When someone wants to 
install unison, he expects the package will install unison and a menu entry. 
And not a unison version guessing tool. 

Also I can't imagine what will the user interface look like.
 
> 
> 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

Greg

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