Unison: Final Answer
Unison didn’t take long to rule itself out. It’s essentially a command line application with a weak GUI shell, and full of errors like these:
The first one’s a flat out bug. The second one isn’t Unison’s fault, but it shouldn’t be exiting the application here just because the network failed. The error message is also wrong. It didn’t lose the connection to the host. It never connected in the first place.
Possibly the Unison protocol and underlying library might be a reasonable base for someone to build a decent GUI on top of. However the current UI is too poor to take seriously. Next!
September 7th, 2006 at 8:56 PM
I thought you were talking about Unison the usenet browsing software from panic. I guess this is the Unison file sync software instead?
September 8th, 2006 at 6:32 AM
Yep, that’s right. I don’t think I’ve ever looked at the Usenet News Reader also called “Unison”.
September 9th, 2006 at 4:47 PM
ERH, looks like you’re going to have to write your own! :)
No seriously, please write your own. I spent many hours fighting with Unison… it plonked just because I had alot of files, after more than a day building the checksum database.
September 15th, 2006 at 3:25 AM
hmm, yeah, I also had strange errors with the version published with ubuntu. after building the newest version from ubuntu unstable I have it working fine.
But I use it only to sync a local and a local nfs-mount, not using the network daemon.
A while ago their website said it won’t be developed further, but that seems to have changed.
I’ve been looking for something like unison a while, but it was the only tool I found with these features. I’d be interested to help if somebody wants to get going write something similar in java, as I am not into C and GTK tp help making unison itself better.