Can unison better help with renamed hosts?

Dear All,

I've been a long time user of Unison, and love it a lot! It really just
works for me.

The only real downside I have found so far, is, that over the many years
of usage, every now and then a remote host is found under a different
name. Since I sync hundreds of GB of files I would like to avoid a re-
creation of the archives. I know there is "rootalias" to help. But this
is actually quite hard for me to get working. I've repeatedly spent more
than one hour on this option, and most recently could not get it to work
at all.

I guess my main problem is that I do not necessarily know the old and new
host names that unison considers a host to have. As an example, a machine
that I sync is known through various means:
  - The local hostname on the machine is "bool", with our company domain name
  - The machine is known as "bool" through /etc/hosts on other machines
  - The machine is known as "bool" through my .ssh/config with the local IP,
    username and SSH port
  - The machine is known as "bool" with domain name through my .ssh/config,
    with the outside company IP, username and SSH port
  - The machine is known via DNS on the internet through the company DNS
    server

I successfully synced my laptop against this machine, from inside the
company network. Later from home, it was virtually impossible for me to
tell unison that the remote host is available under the external name.
It seems not so many possible options, but all combinations of rootalias
that I tried failed, and its virtually impossible to know why.

I think it would be great if unison could print something like this, in
the error message:
     The remote host was known as //XXX//YYY/
     and is now found as //PPP//QQQ/
     If this is guaranteed to be the same host, you can set
     rootalias = SOMETHING -> SOMEOTHERTHING

Then it should be trivial to debug the problem, and correctly set
"rootalias".

Thanks for your consideration, and all the best,

     Mario Emmenlauer

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