Unison File Synchronizer, Gentoo and Windows

I’m currently migrating a couple of Windows boxes. When installing the latest (at the time of writing) Unison for Windows, I ran into three problems:

  1. Unison didn’t find the appropriate GTK+ DLL on the Windows boxes. This can easily be solved by installing GTK+ for Windows as explained (note: “If everything else fails, read the manuals” is not always the best strategy, but it’s applicable here too ;)
  2. After having emerged unision on my server and configured a new unison profile on the current Windows box, when executing unison on Windows, it complained about a rather cryptic ‘Uncaught exception Unix.Unix_error(20, “create_process”, “ssh”)’ error. Googling lead to the nice Bornholtz Group blog entry explaining what to do in such a case. Doing what’s written there solved the problem for me.
  3. After that, unison on Windows could connect to the server but complained about a unison version mismatch. My local “Unison for Windows” version was 2.27.10 whereas Gentoo installed an outdated version 2.17.1 of unison (unison-2.17.1-r1.ebuild).. and even for that I had to add an ~amd64 keyword for net-misc/unison to /etc/portage/package.keywords. So I had to make Gentoo install the most current stable version of unision, i.e. v2.27.10. Fortunately, that’s very easy to do, but yet it has to be done manually (edit the existing unison ebuild, creating new digests and manifest files, copy the things to the local portage overlay etc.). For your convenience, I’ve added a TGZ archive for Unison v2.27.10 which you can extract in your local overlay portage tree (e.g. in /usr/local/portage, don’t forget to configure it in /etc/make.conf: set PORTDIR_OVERLAY=/usr/local/portage): net-misc_unison_2.27.10.tgz.

Now unison works great for me. Nonetheless I haven’t tested this only slightly modified ebuild thoroughly enough for submitting it to bugs.gentoo.org. So keep this in mind before using it.. (no warranty etc. blah blah ;)

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