Comment 1 for bug 606154

This has been an ongoing problem for several years now.

One version of Unison came out with Ubuntu 8.04. When I upgraded some of my workstations to 8.10, suddenly they could not back up to the Unison server (which was on 8.04 LTS). I was forced to upgrade all of my 8.04 LTS servers to a non-official Unison package. And here we are again with 10.04 and 10.10.

The root cause of this headache is that Unison is not backwards compatible between versions. (This is stupid. Unison should be like rsync.) But Ubuntu makes it worse by not offering backports when new releases of Unison come out.

Here is another user with the same problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1449670.html

His use-case scenario, using Unison with Macs, Windows, and Linuxes, is also how I use Ubuntu.

Please complain to the Unison maintainers to quit being so pedantic about version number strings, and in the meantime, Ubuntu could start offering regular (zero-day) backports would allow us to do easy upgrades to our older systems.