Fedora 8 used to include Unison 2.13. However, a recent update bumped the version to 2.27.57. This new version is incompatible with the old version, and consequently this update completely breaks all existing users of Unison. Incompatible updates like this are only allowed in new releases of Fedora; they should not be randomly incorporated into updates of existing Fedora versions. Therefore, please urgently roll back the F8 (and earlier) packages to the old version. F9 (devel) can happily updata.
Im am aware of that. However, this update has been requested by several people, exactly because on other platforms the newer version is generally used. Two Fedora boxes seem to synchronize as well after the update as before, so I consider this not a bug.
No way, this is definitely a bug! Your argument (That F8 doesn't need to inter-operate with anything other than F8) is basically the same as Microsoft saying "hey, Windows inter-operates with Windows, so who cares about standards?". The correct way to handle this is to do as Cygwin did; have a different Unison package for each incompatible version. Then, things don't break for existing users, but users wanting the updated version can simply install the other package. For example, have packages unison_2_13-$release and unison_2_27-$other_release.
Welcome to bleeding edge. NOTABUG.
I ran into this problem between F6 and F8 systems. However, the F8 rpm installs just fine on F6. So, yes, NOTABUG... - Mike
Bleeding egde??? Thats why you have the six months release cycle and rawhide. Major break of compatibility with an update to a stable release is insane.
Well, what does it break compatibility with ? Not F-7 as updates have been pushed for that. F-6 is EOL. Fedora can't possibly keep compatibility with RHEL, otherwise it wouldn't evolve. I'm not sure I see the problem here - please be specific about what platforms it has broken compatibility with.
The more generic bug here is that yum won't re-install the working version when a packager ships a newer update that turns out to be broken in real-world situations.
You can do this to get the old version back: wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/unison-2.13.16-3.fc6.i386.rpm rpm --oldpackage -UvH unison-2.13.16-3.fc6.i386.rpm You'll probably also want to edit /etc/yum.conf to add: exclude=unison so that "yum update" (or whatever mechanism you use) won't simply install the new version again.
I had the same problem. This is definitely a bug. Unison shouldn't get upgraded until Fedora 9.
By the way, since Unison requires matching versions, the RPM should allow several versions to be installed at the same time. You should be able to run unison-2.13 or unison-2.27 to get either version. It should be possible to have both versions installed at the same time. In any case, backwards incompatible changes should only happen in the development repo.
I have created a compatibility package. See bug 433915 for the review request. I intend to package this for FC-7, F-8, EPEL 4, EPEL 5, and devel. Gérard, can you review this new package? Thanks.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 433915 ***