From: Andrew Schulman <schulman DOT andrew AT epamail DOT epa DOT gov>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: ping Unison users: abandon versions 2.9.1-2.12.0 ?
Date: Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:20:40 -0400
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Unison users on Cygwin:

I'm preparing a new unison2.27 package, to be released shortly. As I do
that, I'm looking over the old Unison packages in Cygwin:

unison2.9.1
unison2.9.20
unison2.10.2
unison2.12.0
unison2.13
unison2.17

and I'm thinking that it's time for me to abandon the first four of these,
up to and including unison2.12.0.  If I do that, those packages will be
removed from the Cygwin archives, unless someone else takes them over, which
is unlikely.  My reasoning is as follows:

* Linux distros have all moved on to later versions.  Fedora, SuSE, and even
Debian stable (a good laggard for comparison) all use version 2.13.16
AFAICT.

* Older versions aren't maintained upstream.  Bug fixes go into the new
versions.  With most software projects that means you just upgrade to the
newer version, but with Unison this is harder to do because you need to have
matching versions on the client and server.

* Maintenance overhead for me.  There aren't any upstream updates to these
versions any more, but the Cygwin README files (at least in their current
form) in all Unison versions have to be updated, and so a new Cygwin package
update released, every time I add a new unison* package.

At some point, those old versions will become so old that essentially no one
is using them any more.  I'm guessing that that has already happened with
2.9.1 and 2.9.20 (which had a lot of bugs that were fixed in later
versions), and probably also with 2.10.2 and 2.12.0.

However, I want to be careful removing packages because I don't want to
strand any users without whatever version they need to connect with their
server.  Of course, anyone with an older version already installed would
still be able to use it, but you wouldn't be able to install them any more.

So my question to you is:  Is anyone still using any of the unison2.9.1,
unison2.9.20, unison2.10.2, or unison2.12.0 packages in Cygwin?  If so,
which OS or distro are you connecting to, that's still using the old
versions?  Is an upgrade to a later version of unison available on that
platform?

If I don't hear clearly that someone still needs these old versions of
Unison, then I'm going to abandon them and they'll go away from Cygwin.

Thanks,
Andrew.

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