Here we list planned and imagined improvements to Unison.  Ones that we
regard as most important are marked with *.  See the file BUGS.txt for a
list of currently open bugs.

###########################################################################

BEFORE NEXT RELEASE
===================

docs
  - institute a consistent way of referring to preferences
  - change 'flag' to 'preference' (also in the code)
  - document good trick: use -1 switch to ssh if the paths are set up wrong
    on the remote host
  - couple of items for docs from unison.todo

tidy this file [bcp]

                              CURRENT TASKS
                              =============

we should reload the current preference file (if it's changed, at least)
  when we restart

Source code tidying:
  use finalize instead of unwindProtect where possible

Use exit status to report whether all files were (0) or were not
  (nonzero) successfully synced

Make sure that no filesystem check is missing in the transport agent.

allow preference files to have no extension before adding .prf

add a preference saying which preference file to append new Ignore
  directives to

exclude files like .#sakjdf when scanning for preference files

> In menu Actions
>  - show Diff applies to the current line, while
>  - revert to unision's recommandation applies to all lines 
> Should be clearer and/or homogeneous behavior.
> I would also like to have "revert to unision's recommandation" for the
> current line. 

Auto-termination of the graphical UI (switch-controlled)
  * Unison starts in the usual way and checks for changes
  * If there are no conflicts, it proceeds without waiting for confirmation
  * If there *are* conflicts, it waits for instructions, just like now
  * In either case, when it's finished transferring the changes, it quits

would be nice to be able to "Proceed" just the selected line

> Show diff should behave as an emacs view-mode buffer and quit on a single 
> 'q' in the window, or better quit even without focus be sent to the diff
> window...
The UI for the diff functionality needs some polishing.  (Also, it should
be merged with the new "merge" functionality.)

create alias mechanism for preferences and rationalize their names

should strip symbols from binary files in 'make exportnative'

> On a line, I would like to have a description of the action to be taken in
> clear words: (e.g. will erase file on local or will copy from local to
> remote, etc.)
This might be a good use for "tool tips," if I knew how to make them work
using lablGTK.

The archive should indicate whether it is case-dependant or not.

When loading archives, one should check that they have the same checksum.

there should probably not be just one backup directory for all instances
  of unison on each machine.  Or, if there is, it should be indexed by
  full fspaths (from the root), not just paths.

in gtk ui, display green checkmark next to finished items even if their
  direction indicates a conflict; do not list such items as "skipped" at
  the end

the invocation of the external 'diff' program should be selectable using the 
  same conventions as the 'merge' program

in text UI, it would be nicer to 
   - print just one line per file being transferred
   - move the carriage up after each one, so that only failures are
     left on the screen at the end
   - put a "failure and skip count" at the end, like the GTK ui

add a command to "restart with paths set to just the list of paths that
  failed or had unresolved conflicts on the previous run"

small addition to merge functionality:
  if the external merge program *deletes* one of the files it is given,
  Unison should interpret this as "Copy the other file onto this location
  (instead of merging)".  This will allow some other interesting 
  functionality, e.g. external programs that may decide to keep both
  versions by moving one of them out of the way (mh-rename).

another: would be nice to be able to invoke DIFFERENT merge programs
  depending on paths

look at unison.todo folder and move tasks into here (or do them!)

Make sure that all abnormal terminations get written in the log
  file.  (Also log normal termination, so we can see whether there was
  a crash.)

add a switch '-logerrors' that makes unison log error messages to a
  separate file in addition to the standard logfile

Rewrite recon.ml in a more modular way.  Probably, have for each property
  a function taking the previous file state and the state on each
  replicas, and returning in what the synchronization operation should be
  (nothing, left, right, conflict); a combinator then merge the results.

Track down memory leak in uigtk.ml (we originally guessed it had
  something to do with calls to detectCmd and friends not being
  tail-recursive, but this does not seem to be it) 

consider separating switches into 'ordinary' and 'expert' categories,
  documented in separate sections


###########################################################################

                                WISH LIST
                                =========
          (good ideas that we're NOT working on right at the moment)

FRESHLY ADDED
=============

[From Manuel Serrano] Would be nice to put the arrows in different
directions in different colors, so that, e.g., you could quickly scan the
list of changes and make sure that they are all in the same direction

[From Yan Seiner]
  Can unison modify the (*nix) environment to show the
  ip/name/some_other_id of the system making the connection?  This would
  help tremendously.
  For example, vtun does this:
  ---
  root      6319  0.0  0.6  1984  852 ?        S<   Aug27   0:37 vtund[s]:
  bgsludge tun tun10
  root      6324  0.0  0.6  1984  852 ?        S<   Aug27   2:00 vtund[s]:
  cardinal tun tun0
  root     17001  0.0  0.6  1984  848 ?        S<   Aug27   0:05 vtund[s]:
  wtseller tun tun11
  root     20100  0.0  0.6  1984  852 ?        S<   Aug28   0:02 vtund[s]:
  cardridg tun tun1
  ----
  So I know I have four sessions, to each named machine, and I know
  immediately who is connected and who is not.  If I have to kill a
  session, I don't kill the wrong one.

Unison's gui offers an `Actions' menu with a variety of features
regarding preferences.  I would love to see an action with the following
semantics:
  if the two files differ only in their modification time,
  prefer the older modification time.

> Could there be an option between -ui text and -ui graphic that when combine
> with -batch and -auto would start in text mode, but pop up an interactive
> graphic window when real conflicts happens.

An idea for the interface to the external merge functionality:
  created a general mechanism for invoking external functionality...
    - in profile, declare a command of the form
           key M = external "merge ##1 ##2 ###" --> overwriting originals
      (concrete syntax open to discussion!).  Main parts are
         - what key to bind it to in the UI(s)
         - the command line to start up
         - variables (##1 and ##2) for the local and remote files
           (the remote file will automatically be copied to a local temp
           file, if this variable is used)
         - a variable (###) for a temporary output file
         - an indication of what to do with this output file
           (or maybe this could be automatic)
         - (should also indicate which machine(s) to run the command on?)

[A good idea for the ssh prompt issue...]  I'm not sure why you would
need a C implementation; you could do the same thing in CAML that expect
does: allocate a PTY, start up ssh on that, and interact with it. On
Windows, you can probably do the same with the Win32 console API,
although I don't see why such an improvement needs to work uniformly
across all platforms to be useful.  [Note that allocating PTYs is not
very portable, but we could at least try allocating one and see if
something useful comes back...]

The unison gui currently displays a percentage completion in the lower right
corner.  I would find it comforting if it would also display an effective
bandwidth there, i.e., how many bits per second are flowing through the
transport layer?  I make this request because owing to a hardware 
catastrophe, I have just started using Unison through the phone lines, and
it seems to do nothing for a long period of time.  I don't know whether
to blame the cheap modem, the cheap ISP, or whether Unison simply isn't
telling me that bits are flowing through the wire.  (netstat -tn
suggests not much is happening, but I don't know if the results can
be trusted.)

SMALL FUNCTIONALITY IMPROVEMENTS
================================

*** See if we can use create times (and file sizes) under Windows as
    pseudo-inode-numbers for purposes of update detection.

*** Currently, if a file changes on either side between the initial update
    detection and the time when the transport module tries to propagate
    changes, the transport is aborted.  But if the change occurred on the
    replica that is being used as the source for the transfer (which will
    be the common case!), then there is no reason to abort -- we should
    just propagate the newest version.

*** When unison notices lock files in the archive directory, it should
    offer to delete them *for* the user, rather than forcing the user to
    delete them manually.

** It would be nice to have a "merge" command (similar to "diff" in the
   UI) that invokes a user-specified merging tool (which one could
   perhaps depend on a regex matched against the file's pathname) on the
   two versions, allows the user to merge as desired, and writes the
   merged version (if any) over both of the originals.  (There are lots of
   merge tools that could be used with this -- e.g., kfilemerge, ediff,
   xdiff, mgdiff, kmerge, etc.  But I had trouble finding even one that I could
   install cleanly on my linux box.  How hard would it be to write our
   own?  Then we could unify the merge and diff functionality, it would be
   more portable, etc.) 
   ==> Other potential merge tools: 
     idiff [BCP has a copy of the code for idiff that Norman sent.]  

** Allow 'default.prf' in place of 'default' for profile names

* Maybe we should write debugging and tracing information to stdout
  instead of stderr?

* URI pathname syntax
  Why is the following command wrong?
     unison -servercmd `which unison` /usr/local ssh://labrador/usr/local
  It took me three tries and careful reading of the documentation to
  figure it out.  I don't have any good suggestions here, other than
  that I think the whole issue of relative vs absolute pathnames needs
  serious thought.  I think the current interfaces do not work very
  well.  One possibility that I will float is that you invent a special
  character string to refer to the root of synchronization.
  E.g., interpret ~ as $HOME in roots.
  --
  Also: we should add the file:// syntax to URIs...
    file://C:/Necula    (C:/Necula on the local file system)
    file:////share/subdir  (//share/subdir as from the point of view of
                          the local file system)
    unison://host///share/subdir
  -- 
  Should local roots in a profile be canonized?
    Right now, we can have a relative root in the profile.  This
    is going to be a problem if unison is started in a different
    directory.

* Now that we always keep fingerprints in the archive, we should
  re-fingerprint "possibly updated" files during update detection.  (If we
  do this, then we can completely eliminate false positives.  This, in
  turn, will allow us to give a more demanding specification.)

* At the moment, if Unison is interrupted during a non-atomic operation
  on the file system, the user has to clean things up manually, following
  the instructions in the the recovery log.  We should do that for them.
  (This is actually a bit tricky, since we need to be careful about what
  might happen if unison crashes during recovery, etc.  The best way to
  accomplish this would be to write a general logging/recovery facility
  in OCaml.)

* Dealing with ACLs: Maybe this is what we should do actually.  We could
  specify a user (and similarly a group) to unison.  It would be
  interpreted in a special way: if a file is owned by this user, unison
  will rather consider that the owner of the file is undefined.  So, when
  a file owned by an unkown user is synchronized, the file owner is set
  to the default user.  Then, on the next synchronizations, unison will
  consider that the owner has not been propagated and try again.  [Should
  be easy once the reconciler is made more modular]

* The -terse preference should suppress more (in fact, almost all)
  messages in the text ui.  See Dale Worley's message for a detailed
  proposal. 

Dale Worley's suggestion for relocating archives:
  >   You're right: it's not all that tricky.  So would you be happy if you
  >   could run unison in a special mode like this
  >       unison -relocate //old-host1//path1 //old-host2//path2 \
  >                        //new-host1//path1 //new-host2//path2
  >   (where all the hosts and paths are normalized) and it would move the
  >   archives for you on both machines?
  Actually, I think that what you want is for the user to specify the
  old paths in *normalized* form and the new paths in *non-normalized*
  form.  That is, unison uses the old paths literally as provided by the
  user, but it applies the usual normalization algorithm to the new
  paths.
  This may sound strange, but I think that it's the Right Thing:
  - There is no guarantee that the normalization algorithm, applied to
    the old paths as the user used to specify them, normalizes to the
    the normalized paths that are recorded in the archive.  Indeed,
    there may no longer be *any* path which normalizes to the recorded
    paths.
  - The user can extract the normalized old paths from the second line
    of the archive files.  This is clumsy, but reliable.  And we don't
    intend the user to relocate an archive very often.
  - But for the new paths, you want to normalize what the user supplies,
    because he doesn't know in advance how Unison is going to normalize
    the new paths, and may well specify them incorrectly.  That would
    leave him with a relocated archive that he might not be able to use
    at all.
  You might want to put quotes around the pathnames in the second line
  of the archive, since MS-Windows directory names can contain spaces,
  etc.

For safety...
  - Add a preference 'maxdelete' taking an integer parameter, default 100
    (or perhaps even less -- keeping it fairly small will help naive users
    avoid shooting themselves in the foot).  A negative number means
    skip this check (i.e., infinity).
  - When the transport subsystem gets control (i.e., just after the user
    says 'go' to the user interface, when not running in batch mode)
    it first checks the number of files that are going to be deleted
    (including all the contents of any directories that are marked for
    deletion).  If it is more than maxdelete (and maxdelete is
    positive), then...
       - If we're in batch mode (batch=true), we halt without doing
         anything.
       - If we're not in batch mode, we display a warning message and
         make the user confirm.  (If they do *not* confirm, it would be
         nice to dump them back into the user interface again, but this
         would require a little rewriting of our control flow.)
  - Would also be nice to include a display in the UI someplace that says
    how many files are to be deleted/changed/created plus how many bytes
    to be transferred, and a warning signal (display in red or something)
    if these exceed the current setting of maxdelete.

Might be nice to provide an option that says "if you're propagating a
  newly created directory and something goes wrong with something inside
  it, just ignore the file that failed and keep going with the rest of
  the directory."  [We probably don't want to continue in all cases (for
  instance, when the disk is full)]

Would be nice to be able to run unison in a special mode like this
    unison -relocate //old-host1//path1 //old-host2//path2 \
                     //new-host1//path1 //new-host2//path2
  (where all the hosts and paths are canonized) and have it move the
  archives for you on both machines?

It would be nice if unison had a tool by which it could regenerate all
  the MD5 sums and compare them to what it has stored, then produce a list
  of files that are different.  I obviously cannot count on file size and
  date in  this case; those may not have changed but the contents may be
  corrupt.

If the connection to the server goes away and then comes back up, it
  would be nice if Unison would transparently re-establish it (at least,
  when this makes sense!)

If we synchronize a path whose parent doesn't exist in one replica, we'll
  fail.  Might be nicer to create the parent path if needed.

maybe put backup files somewhere other than in the replica (e.g. in
  $HOME/tmp, or controlled by preference)

Better documentation of the -backups flag, and a way to expire old backups

change Util.filetype to int64 (this seems like a "right thing", but seems
  to cause an "out of memory" error on the first sync of my full replica.)

Add a preference that makes the reconciler ignore prefs-only differences 
  between files (not updating the archive, though -- just suppressing
  the difference -- will this slow things down too much??  Maybe it needs
  to happen in the update detector, before things are transmitted across
  the network.)

Perhaps we should interpret both / and the local separator as path
  separators, i.e., under Windows / and \, under Mac / and :, and under
  Unix just /.  For Windows this will be fine, since / is not allowed in
  filenames.

Maybe have an option to tell do not transfer toto.dvi if toto.tex exists (or
  toto.ps if toto.dvi): something like
          Ignore .dvi If .tex
  ===> This is not a good idea -- would give different ignore results on
  the two machines.  But maybe a variant would work:
    - Have an option to execute a command if a given file exist like
            Execute rm core If core
            Execute make clean If Makefile

We should put in a preference that forces Unison to do really safe update
  detection (with fingerprinting), even on Unix systems.  (Maybe just for
  some paths?)

Maybe we should never emit a conflict for modtimes; instead, we just
  propagate the largest one.


USER INTERFACE
==============

* After clicking "Create new profile" in the initial profile window and
  giving a name for the new profile, it is confusing to get dumped back
  into the profile window again and have to explicitly select the new
  profile.  Would be better to skip this step and go straight into
  filling in its fields.

* Would it be hard to add "tool tips" to the buttons in the UI?

* Another usability issue: , and < should mean the same to unison. It would
  be nice if both had the same representation on-screen (ie, show a "<"
  even if I typed a ","). Similarly for . and >.

* The menu help for left/right arrow both said `transfer local to local'.
  Not helpful.  The items in question are pathnames, which you might not
  have to abbreviate.  To save space one might consider replacing any
  common prefix, and also short prefixes that look like they might be
  automounter goo, with an ellipsis.  Then show, e.g., 20 chars.  I'd
  also be willing to name paths in my profile, e.g., replica flatcoat =
  /home/cellar/nr replica cellar = /m/cellar60/nr This would be
  especially attractive if my short names were meaningful on the command
  line.

* In the GTK user interface, it would be nice to be able to put up a window 
  displaying the contents of the log file (and add log messages to it
  dynamically as we're working).  Be careful, though: the log could get
  large and we don't want this to be too slow. 

Text mode user interface should be brought up to date with graphical
  interface (it should prompt for profile selection, creation, root
  entry, etc.; command characters should be the same; ...)

Since the manual is pretty big, it would be nice if the on-line version
  were accessible through cascading menus, allowing direct access to
  individual subsections.  It would also be nice if it were formatted a
  bit more attractively, using proportional-width fonts, etc.  (Does GTK
  have something like an RTF widget?)

If I have a change I look at the detail window. It would be nice to be
  able to click on one of the lines there instead of pressing one of <-
  or ->. For one thing in the detail window the relative position of the
  two files is up and down and translating that to <- or -> is somewhat
  unintuitive.

Also, it would be nice to highlight in the detailed window the
   elements that have changed.

Make it possible to select a bunch of conflicts at the same time and
  override them all together

The UI window should display the current roots somewhere.

There should be a -geometry command-line interface, following the usual X
  conventions. 

put in a command-line option that makes fatal errors exit right away
  without displaying anything in the graphical UI (for debugging)

Use the CTree widget to display the list of files
  Add the ability to close and open directories in the UI.

* it would be nice to give a visual indication of which files are
  particularly big, so that the user can tell where the transfer
  operations may get slowed down.  Maybe a "size bar" showing the log
  of the size (perhaps also color coded). 
  ===> less urgent now because we can re-sort the update items by size

Would it be hard to allow long-running transfers to be aborted?
  For instance, the key "/" aborts the transmission of the selected file
  OR:
  Allow the user to terminate individual operations by clicking a
  "cancel" button.  (This is not completely straightforward because
  the whole program is single-threaded.  But it should be possible for
  the low-level transport code in remote.ml to realize that the
  operation has been aborted, clean up, and raise an exception.)

It would be nice if the initial 'usage' message were not so long.  Maybe
  we could split options into 'novice' and 'expert' ones, and only print
  the novice ones (with an indication how to obtain the full expert
  printout).


TIDYING
=======

* Tidying
    - divide files into subdirs
    - either fix the threads stuff or rip it out

* Go through the sources and make all fatal and transient error messages
  as informative as possible 

* The instructions for installing LablGTK on Windows are broken at the
  moment.  (And not easy to fix because it requires quite a bit of
  tweaking.) 
  ===> Better to fix this after the new LablGTK (and OCaml) release

remove ourlablgtk from the distribution, once we make a new major release

Make the sources available by anonymous CVS (maybe from SourceForge)

More documentation (especially in the interface files) is always nice.
  In particular, there isn't enough documentation of the big picture.
  It isn't clear how to fit together archives, servers, paths, roots, 
  update detection, reconciliation, conflict resolution, or the user 
  interface...

Ocamlexc v1.0, the uncaught exceptions analyzer for Objective Caml is now
  available from Pessaux's home page.  It would be fun to run it over the
  Unison sources and see if it reveals any problems.


LARGER EXTENSIONS
=================

** Multi-threading.  
   Limited support for multi-threading just during the transport phase
   has been implemented and it makes a BIG difference in speed, but it
   doesn't completely work yet.  (In particular, many things --
   e.g. debugging messages -- are not threadsafe.) 

* Here's an idea for speeding up dealing with moved files: 
  - we keep a log of informational hints about every file we look at,
    containing at least its size and (if we have it) it's fingerprint
    we just keep building up this information, never checking that
    it's still up to date until we try to use it, at which time we do
    double-check it with what's in the FS
  - when we're about to copy a file, we first look whether we've seen
    a file the same size on the receiving side.  If so, we see whether
    one of these files has the same fingerprint as the one we're about
    to copy, and if so we copy from the local one instead.

It would be good to have a graphical interface allowing management and
  editing of profiles, ignore patterns, etc.  Or, less ambitiously, just
  have UI options for all command-line options (killServer) 

How about a facility so that you can specify more than one pair of
  file systems for a single invocation of Unison? This would be like
  calling Unison multiple times, except that it would ask all the
  questions at once.  Better yet, we could actually deal with the
  multi-replica case.  (The latter is pretty hard.)

What about invoking some user-specified operation on each file as it
  is transferred?  Or in each directory where things have changed?
  (This will require some careful design work.)

Sync with archived directories (in tar / zip / gz format) would be
  nice.  Seems a bit awkward to implement, though: at the moment there
  are a lot of functions all over the place that investigate and
  modify the file system, and these would all have to be replaced with
  a layer that transparently parses, etc., etc.

Consider using other authentication services (e.g. Kerberos) instead
  of / in addition to ssh.

What happens when we synchronize, then decide to ignore some existing file
  What happens to the entry in the archive?  If mirroring, it may be
  large, we probably want to delete it from the archive.

File level synchronization (bookmarks, mailboxes)


WINDOWS ISSUES
==============

Filename case synchronization

* Update detection under Windows is much slower than under Unix, because
  the only straightforward way to do it correctly is to re-fingerprint
  every file every time.  On Unix, we don't need to actually read the
  contents of files unless they've changed, because we know that, if a
  file's inode number and modtime are both the same as the last time we
  looked at it, then its contents have definitely not changed.  Windows
  filesystems don't provide anything like inode numbers (as far as we
  have been able to find out), so we can't use this trick.  
  --
  We do know a way to obtain a reasonable approximation to an inode
  number on FAT32 filesystems: there's a low-level API that allows you to
  find out the physical disk address of the start of a file.  We could
  use this for fast update detection.  On NTFS, there is actually
  something like an inode (but does it behave exactly the same?)  This
  extension really needs to be done by a Windows expert -- we're not sure
  how to do something that would work reliably on all the different kinds
  of Windows filesystems, etc.  (Neal Tibrewala sent us a useful message
  about all this one time -- should look it up when the time comes to
  address this.)
  --
  Another idea, on NTFS, is to use the system log -- see
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL=/library/psdk/
    winbase/fsys_3xrg.htm
  -- 
  Another idea is to add a new flag '-fast' which, when set, causes unison 
  to behave as follows:
        - during update detection, just use modtime information (plus as many
          other attributes as we can easily get -- e.g. create times).
        - during reconciliation, if we notice that a file has been modified on
          one side and we're not sure whether it was modified on the other
          (because we used the fast modtime check), then we do the full update
          check using fingerprints to make sure that it's really not modified.
      The approximation in the first step means that we may (very occasionally)
      miss propagating some changes.  But the check in the second step means
      that we will never overwrite any of these changes.  So it's not unsafe.
  --
  Actually, perhaps an even better idea is to add an '-unsafe' flag
    that tells Unison to assume that if the create time, modtime, and
    file size are all identical, then a file has not changed.  

when typing ctrl-c in windows (dos-window in win98SE) when
  unison is asking for conflicting updates there araises following
  message (sorry for my bad translation to english):
  "This program is closes because of a non-valid action. Contact the
  manufactura if the error remains".                            

NTFS seems to have two ways of setting a file read-only!  
Comments from Karl Moerder:
    Tonight I made some files read-only on my desktop at home. I did this by
    setting global read and execute permissions (from the security tab of
    properties). I ran Unison and it didn't notice the change. I then set
    the permissions back to full control and then selected the read-only box
    (from the general tab of properties). I ran Unison again and it noticed
    and pushed the perms change to the server.
    I understand that Windows is a bit squirrely here, but how do you decide
    which permissions to look at? It seems like perhaps the ones on the
    security tab would be more natural. (?)
    --
    I get similar results with both bits (they both cause read-only
    behavior).
    I believe that the origin of the two modes of setting is that the first
    set is the old way of doing Windows protection (probably the interface
    provided on FAT file systems) and the new way is the more Unix like way
    (added for NTFS file systems). The new way has rwxdpo bits for each
    group (and there can be several groups).


###########################################################################
###########################################################################
###########################################################################

OLD/DEAD STUFF
==============

We should handle more gracefully the file that cannot be synchronized
(for instance, read-only files)
propagating changes within a read-only directory is going to fail
    similar problem propagating unreadable files
  ==> this is not a bug.  The GUI should tell the user what happened in
      a nice way, though

It would be nice to have an option which takes .cvsignore
files into account.

Change "-socket 1234" to "-server -port 1234"??  (See msg from Karl Moerder)

Pipe "diff" output through a pager in text mode

Trevor's text mode bug:
  I tried poking into the text interface problem and got some really
  strange results.
  It doesn't seem to work at all under the cygwin bash window or ms-dos
  prompt.  E.g., typing unison -ui text simply returns, as does unison
  -version (without printing anything).  The -dumbtty flag does not
  help.
  [There is no console associated to the program in this can.
   Therefore, writing to stdout makes the program fail.]
  However, it works perfectly under an emacs shell, where I've set
  things up to use bash.
  [I don't know why it works in this case.]
  Maybe whoever else is using Windows can give it a try on their
    machine?
  And another:
    When I launch unison (client side) under windows nt, it works great. It
    also works fine under windows 98 when I use a standard dos command
    shell. The trouble I'm having is when use cygwin and the bash shell
    (B20.1) and launch the client from win98, I get an extra carriage return
    in the stream. This CR means the default action for the first file diff
    is taken. If the first conflict is a two way, the program correctly
    requeries me becuase it won't accept a CR. 
    I'm guessing that cygwin sends part of a cr/lf pair that other programs
    absorb or something similar. Again I only see this under win98 using
    cygnus...
  Console management under Window: a console is needed for the text UI
  and ssh. Creation of a console looks something like that:
    int hCrt;
    FILE *hf;
    AllocConsole();
    hCrt = _open_osfhandle((long) GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), _O_TEXT);
    hf = _fdopen( hCrt, "w" );
    *stdout = *hf;
    setvbuf( stdout, NULL, _IONBF, 0 ); 

Can we have a way to toggle this after unison starts?  Sometimes my
laptop has a fast link, sometimes a slow link.  Consider that when
click-starting it isn't possible to add command-line args.  Having two
different profiles is possible, but, seems more like an annoying
duplication of all the ignore stuff etc.
            
The issue about where Unison should put its files if HOME is not set...
  > The problem here seems to be that unison is trying to create
  > DANGER.README in the directory specified by your HOME environment
  > variable, which seems to be set to /, where you do not have write
  > permission.  Does that make any sense?
  > 
    Yes it does, as I am running unison from inetd and it seems to default
  to / as its home dir.  How about changing that default to /var/unison,
  or almost anything else but /?  That would be nice....  (I know, I know,
  all those win systems don't have a /var/ directory....)
    Anyway, as long as the unison user has write permissions in /, unison
  from inetd works like a charm.  Definitely NOT RECOMMENDED without a
  strong firewall and VPN, though. <big grin>
Trevor:
    Maybe the DANGER.README should be in the unison directory, and we can
    have a command line flag for specifying the directory.  If so, we
    can't expect the user to notice it, we have to make sure unison
    conveys the info and lets the user recover (no more manual deletion).

Have a button for "Show ignores"

put in a "paranoid" switch that makes the update detector ignore the archive

Unison should perhaps confirm when I ask for a conflict to be resolved
  by copying an old file over a new file.
  ==> this is a good idea, but we're not sure exactly how the UI should
      report this / ask for confirmation (pop up a window? display
      something in red?)

it would be nice if some *intermittent* status messages got displayed
  when the remote host was working on detecting updates (but be careful
  not to display too many -- this can slow things down a lot)
  ===> This is not feasible

[Trevor] Finish integrating the new syntax for replicas. There are some
  important design decisions to make.
  * Should we allow synchronization of two remote roots on the same
    host? E.g., suppose we are host foo and we execute
       unison //bar //bar:5050
    The first root is our home directory on bar, and the second root
    is the directory on bar that a unison server was started in. It
    might be reasonable to do this. The technical problem is that the
    Remote module maps HOSTS to network connections (sockets). Clearly
    here we need one connection per root, so Remote should really map
    ROOTS to network connections. But there are also a bunch of
    functions that execute according to the host, and not the root:
    processCommitLogOnHost, renameOnHost, propagatePrefsTo,
    canonizeFspathOnHost, canonicalHostnameOnHost, killServerOnHost,
    and maybe others. 

Another diff issue:
  If I run the diff, and I decide that the version with the < marker
  is what I want to keep, I have to choose the > arrow in unison.
  I find this fact very disconcerting.  Suggestion: use diff -c.  [Norman]
  ==> Not a bug.  Norman can use diff -c if he prefers.

Get rid of _ stuff in paths
  proposal:
    path <--> printpath    use name<->printname; insert "/" as separator
    name <-> printname :
      a/b   <->  <not possible>
      a\b   <->  a=bkslash=b
      a=b   <->  a=eq=b
    name2unixname
      a/b   <->  <not possible>
      a\b   <->  a\b
      a=b   <->  a=b
    name2win32name
      a/b   <->  <not possible>
      a\b   <->  a/b
      a=b   <->  a=b

Here are some weird invocations we ought to detect.
  * unison foo foo/bar
  * unison foo foo
  * unison //saul/foo //saul.cis.upenn.edu/foo
All of these involve synchronizing overlapping trees.
Another example would be two trees with nonoverlapping roots that
overlap due to symbolic links somewhere inside the trees.
  ==> should be part of the same sanity check at the beginning

Encrypt socket connections.
  ==> We've resisted doing this because it seems hard and we don't want
  to do anything in this domain that we can't do well.  But it's worth
  thinking about.

"Hanrahan, Donald" <dhanrahan@logicon.com>
  Also I find that even with the -batch option set, I am getting a
  fair bit of output to the console rather than the log file.  I am
  not sure if this is going to be a problem when running as a service
  (probably not as long as it doesn't prompt for input).  Perhaps
  someone knows.

Can we detect and follow hard links?  E.g., consider a hard link to a
file outside a root.  Right now we'll update the link to be a new
file, the file outside will not be updated.  Maybe this is the right
behavior; but we should put something into the docs.
