Patch-Tag

» see patch-tag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Patch-Tag opened on 21 January 2009, announced on the Happstack mailing list, which is about as precise a statement of audience as a launch can make. The motto sat under the wordmark in orange: hosting for darcs. The front page said give your code a home. Everything else about the site followed from the fact that one person built it and one small community needed it.

Thomas Hartman wrote it in Haskell on Happstack, and the footer of every page said so, right next to a copyright line that was just his gmail address. Repositories were free if they were open source and priced if they were private, with the pricing page promised for April 2009 and shipped roughly on time. There was a blog and a forum and a repository search, and the whole thing fit on one screen at 1017 pixels wide.

One detail is worth keeping. Every darcs repository on Patch-Tag could also be a wiki, through gitit, the Haskell wiki engine that stores its pages as plain text files inside a version control repository instead of in a database. You could edit the wiki offline, commit, and push it when you were ready. That idea has been reinvented a number of times since by people who did not know it had already shipped.

~ the case file ~

~ why darcs ~

Darcs came out of the Haskell world in 2003, two years before git and Mercurial, and it was built on a different idea. Where git thinks in snapshots of a tree, darcs thinks in patches and in how patches commute with each other, which meant you could pull one specific change out of a branch without dragging its history along. People who used it seriously tended to describe it in terms of what it let them stop worrying about.

Then git arrived with Linux attached to it, and GitHub arrived two years after that and made the social layer the product. By 2009, when Patch-Tag launched, that race was already decided and everybody involved knew it. Building hosting for darcs in 2009 was an act of maintenance for a community that intended to keep working the way it worked.

~ the notice ~

The last working capture of patch-tag.com is from 1 August 2014, and the shutdown message is sitting on the front page under the search box: Patch tag is shugging down August 4 2014. Please migrate repos to hub.darcs.net. The typo is in the original. By 3 September the address was answering with a redirect, and it has never served the site again.

Pointing everyone at hub.darcs.net was the right call, and it is why this closure did not take anything with it. Hub is run by the darcs project rather than by one person with a day job, it was already up, and it is still up now, more than a decade after the service that sent everyone there went dark.

~ the part that was never mine ~

I have written software professionally for most of the years Patch-Tag existed and I have never once run darcs. By the time I was choosing anything, subversion was what work used and git was what everything else used, and the Haskell end of the ecosystem was a place I read about rather than a place I worked. Patch-Tag is the sort of grave I can only report from the outside, off an archived front page and a mailing list announcement.

What is legible from here is the scale of it. One developer, one language, one version control system with maybe a few thousand committed users worldwide, and five and a half years of keeping their repositories online. Then a note with a typo in it, a forwarding address, and a clean exit.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

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