Daily Shaarli

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Yesterday - March 19, 2026

Unison version mismatch causes `follow` to silently fail

I wanted to add a follow=Path {/some/symlink} statement to an existing unison job between two Linux machines, one running Ubuntu Noble with unison 2.53.3 and one running Ubuntu Jammy with unison 2.51.5.

However, whichever way I specified the path/name to the symlink, unison would just sync the link itself instead of the contents of the directory it pointed at.

Exasperated, I thought perhaps the version mismatch between the two unison clients may be causing the weird behaviour. So I tested syncing between the Jammy machine and another Jammy machine that also runs unison 2.51.5. And the sync worked as expected.

$ cat .unison/test.prf
root = /home/taha/KVT
root = ssh://luxor//media/bay/taha/KVT
follow = Path projects/dev

On the remote we have the following symlink:

/media/bay/taha/KVT/projects/dev -> /media/bay/taha/projects/ansible/dev