unison "-repeat watch" not working

Question

I recently installed unison on my home machine (OSX 10.9) and on my remote server (Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit).

I have version 2.40.102 installed in both place. I used 'brew install unison' on my Mac, and I compiled from source on the server.

The issue is that I can't get "-repeat watch" to work. It connects, but then does nothing.

Contacting server...
Connected [//... -> //...]

And that's it. If I pass anything, like, '1' to the -repeat flag it works just fine.

Is there something else that I need to do in order to get it to watch for changes and sync when something changes?

Answer 1

You should update unison to the latest version. According to the manual, prior to version 2.48.3 if the file-monitoring program failed it would silently ignore the issue. In the changelog for 2.48.3:

The file watcher now fails when unable to watch a directory, rather than silently ignoring the issue.

You should update unison to the latest version so at the very least you will get an error message if it is the file watcher that is failing. Version 2.48.3 also made quite a few improvements to the file watcher (unison-fsmonitor), so this should fix your problem.