New beta-release (2.27)

On behalf of all the Unison developers and contributors, I am  
delighted to announce a new beta-release.  Sources are now available  
from the download page, together with precompiled binaries for some  
architectures:

    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/download.html

This release has one known issue at this time: The 'fastcheck' option  
does not appear to be working reliably under windows.  Once this is  
resolved, 2.27 will be promoted to stable status.

     - Benjamin

                         -------------------------------

    Changes since 2.17:

      * The Unison project now accepts donations via PayPal. If you'd  
like
        to donate, you can find a link to the donation page on the  
Unison
        home page (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison).

      * The backup and merge functionality has been completely  
rewritten. The
        external interface has not changed, but numerous bugs, irregular
        behaviors, and cross-platform inconsistencies have been  
corrected.

      * Some important safety improvements:
           + Added a new mountpoint preference, which can be used to
             specify a path that must exist in both replicas at the  
end of
             update detection (otherwise Unison aborts). This can be  
used
             to avoid potentially dangerous situations when Unison is  
used
             with removable media such as external hard drives and  
compact
             flash cards.
           + The confirmation of "big deletes" is now controlled by a
             boolean preference confirmbigdeletes. Default is true,  
which
             gives the same behavior as previously. (This  
functionality is
             at least partly superceded by the mountpoint preference,  
but
             it has been left in place in case it is useful to some
             people.)
           + If Unison is asked to "follow" a symbolic link but there is
             nothing at the other end of the link, it will now flag this
             path as an error, rather than treating the symlink  
itself as
             missing or deleted. This avoids a potentially dangerous
             situation where a followed symlink points to an external
             filesystem that might be offline when Unison is run
             (whereupon Unison would cheerfully delete the corresponding
             files in the other replica!).

      * Smaller changes:
           + Several small fixes to the GTK2 UI to make it work  
better under
             Windows [thanks to Karl M for these].
           + Added forcepartial and preferpartial preferences, which
             behave like force and prefer but can be specified on a
             per-path basis. [Thanks to Alan Schmitt for this.]
           + A bare-bones self test feature was added, which runs unison
             through some of its paces and checks that the results  
are as
             expected. The coverage of the tests is still very limited,
             but the facility has already been very useful in debugging
             the new backup functionality (especially in exposing some
             subtle cross-platform issues).
           + Refined debugging code so that the verbosity of individual
             modules can be controlled separately. Instead of just  
putting
             '-debug verbose' on the command line, you can put '-debug
             update+', which causes all the extra messages in the Update
             module, but not other modules, to be printed. Putting '- 
debug
             verbose' causes all modules to print with maximum  
verbosity.
           + Removed mergebatch preference. (It never seemed very  
useful,
             and its semantics were confusing.)
           + Rewrote some of the merging functionality, for better
             cooperation with external Harmony instances.
           + Changed the temp file prefix from .# to .unison.
           + Compressed the output from the text user interface
             (particularly when run with the -terse flag) to make it
             easier to interpret the results when Unison is run several
             times in succession from a script.
           + Diff and merge functions now work under Windows.
           + Changed the order of arguments to the default diff command
             (so that the + and - annotations in diff's output are
             reversed).
           + Added .mpp files to the "never fastcheck" list (like .xls
             files).

      * Many small bugfixes, including:
           + Fixed a longstanding bug regarding fastcheck and daylight
             saving time under Windows when Unison is set up to
             synchronize modification times. (Modification times  
cannot be
             updated in the archive in this case, so we have to  
ignore one
             hour differences.)
           + Fixed a bug that would occasionally cause the archives  
to be
             left in non-identical states on the two hosts after
             synchronization.
           + Fixed a bug that prevented Unison from communicating
             correctly between 32- and 64-bit architectures.
           + On windows, file creation times are no longer used as a  
proxy
             for inode numbers. (This is unfortunate, as it makes
             fastcheck a little less safe. But it turns out that file
             creation times are not reliable under Windows: if a file is
             removed and a new file is created in its place, the new one
             will sometimes be given the same creation date as the old
             one!)
           + Set read-only file to R/W on OSX before attempting to  
change
             other attributes.
           + Fixed bug resulting in spurious "Aborted" errors during
             transport (thanks to Jerome Vouillon)
           + Enable diff if file contents have changed in one  
replica, but
             only properties in the other.
           + Removed misleading documentation for 'repeat' preference.
           + Fixed a bug in merging code where Unison could sometimes
             deadlock with the external merge program, if the latter
             produced large amounts of output.
           + Workaround for a bug compiling gtk2 user interface against
             current versions of gtk2+ libraries.
           + Added a better error message for "ambiguous paths".
           + Squashed a longstanding bug that would cause file  
transfer to
             fail with the message "Failed: Error in readWrite: Is a
             directory."
           + Replaced symlinks with copies of their targets in the Growl
             framework in src/uimac. This should make the sources easier
             to check out from the svn repository on WinXP systems.
           + Added a workaround (suggested by Karl M.) for the problem
             discussed on the unison users mailing list where, on the
             Windows platform, the server would hang when transferring
             files. I conjecture that the problem has to do with the RPC
             mechanism, which was used to make a call back from the  
server
             to the client (inside the Trace.log function) so that  
the log
             message would be appended to the log file on the client.  
The
             workaround is to dump these messages (about when
             xferbycopying shortcuts are applied and whether they  
succeed)
             just to the standard output of the Unison process, not  
to the
             log file.

    Changes since 2.13.0:
      * The features for performing backups and for invoking external
        merge programs have been completely rewritten by Stephane  
Lescuyer
        (thanks, Stephane!). The user-visible functionality should not
        change, but the internals have been rationalized and there are a
        number of new features. See the manual (in particular, the
        description of the backupXXX preferences) for details.
      * Incorporated patches for ipv6 support, contributed by Samuel
        Thibault. (Note that, due to a bug in the released OCaml 3.08.3
        compiler, this code will not actually work with ipv6 unless
        compiled with the CVS version of the OCaml compiler, where  
the bug
        has been fixed; however, ipv4 should continue to work normally.)
      * OSX interface:
           + Incorporated Ben Willmore's cool new icon for the Mac UI.
      * Small fixes:
           + Fixed off by one error in month numbers (in printed dates)
             reported by Bob Burger

  
  


 
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