[FQuest Announce] Unison Availability

[Kevin]

FutureQuest has received several recent requests to make the Unison file synchronization tool available. As a result we have installed it across all Community Servers.

Unison is a cross platform tool that can be used to keep two directories synchronized while changes are made on either system.

If you don't know what any of that means then consider this to be yet another way you can maintain a copy of your web site on a local development server and then synchronize the changes to the production copy here at FutureQuest. It is a tool that can be used in similar ways to rsync, cvs, and Subversion however it has many other capabilities.

To find out more about Unison read here: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

[Bradley]

Very cool!
Good job you guys, now you just need to head over to the colo and set it up there and we'll be set

[phppete]

Thank you, this will prove to be very useful.

[hobbes]

How does Unison handle versioning (a la subversion)?

Can Unison be used over SFTP, or only SSH (i.e., shell account)?

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by hobbes

How does Unison handle versioning (a la subversion)?

Can Unison be used over SFTP, or only SSH (i.e., shell account)?

In these two areas it works pretty much like rsync. It does not do versioning like Subversion. It simply takes two directory trees and makes them the same by updating the differences in both directions (unlike rsync which is only one way).

It cannot work over SFTP. Since it spawns a unison process on the other end it must use an authenticated SSH connection to a shell account.