[pchiusano]

I know what you mean with those other tools, but this doesn't happen in Unison. The reason those systems are somewhat flaky is that the cache of what's in memory can diverge from the "source of truth" which is a bag of constantly mutating text files. Maybe put another way, cache invalidation is hard in those systems.

When the source of truth is instead a database, content-addressed by hash, cache invalidation is simple - if the hash has changed, a cached result is invalid and needs recomputing. If the hash is the same, you're good. We use this approach in many places throughout Unison and it's quite robust.