Changes in 2.53.8 Released 2025-11-05

• Improve and simplify makefiles. It is now possible to build with BSD make, Solaris/illumos make and NMAKE, in addition to GNU Make. Building with MSVC is much simpler now. The changes are larger than might be expected in a micro; anyone building from source (or packaging) should consult INSTALL.md for updated build instructions.
• Stop installing fsmonitor.py.
• Add ability to use reflinking instead of copying (if supported by filesystem).
• Don't write fpcache if it is not necessary.
• Experimental default-off support to detect moves/renames and rename on destination instead of copying (see -moves-experimental). Deprecation warning: support for external rsync will be removed, likely in 2.54.0. DEPRECATION MAY HAPPEN WITH LESS THAN TYPICAL NOTICE: lablgtk is difficult to use safely, and future maintenance is unclear. Implementing the GUI without lablgtk requires more effort than seems likely to happen. Thus, it is possible that support for the unison GUI may end suddenly, on a particular platform, or on all platforms -- even in a micro release. See

#1075 MAINTENANCE WARNING: No one is contributing to verify that the Mac GUI continues to work -- so it might not. (So far, there are no reports of serious failures.)