Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Almost seven years ago, at a time when the “VCS wars” have not even properly started yet, GitHub was seven days old and most Haskell related software projects were using Darcs as their version control system of choice, when you submitted a patch, you simply ran darcs send and mail with your changes would be sent to the right address, e.g. the maintainer or a mailing list. This was almost as convenient as Pull Requests are on Github now, only that it was tricky to keep track of what was happening with the patch, and it would be easy to forget to follow up on it.

So back then I announced DarcsWatch: A service that you could CC in your patch submitting mail, which then would monitor the repository and tell you about the patches status, i.e. whether it was applied or obsoleted by another patch.

Since then, it quitely did its work without much hickups. But by now, a lot of projects moved away from Darcs, so I don’t really use it myself any more. Also, its Darcs patch parser does not like every submissions by a contemporary darcs, so it is becoming more and more unreliable. I asked around on the xmonad and darcs mailing lists if others were still using it, and noboy spoke up. Therefore, after seven years and 4660 monitored patches, I am officially ceasing to run DarcsWatch.

The code and data is still there, so if you believe this was a mistake, you can still speak up – but be prepared to be asked to take over maintaining it.

I have a disklike for actually deleting data, so I’ll keep the static parts of DarcsWatch web page in the current state running.

I’d like to thank the guys from spiny.org.uk for hosting DarcsWatch on urching for the last 5 years.