Holy freebies, batman, it’s May and we still haven’t started charging for private repos… Yep, it’s taking patch-tag longer to get the commercial ball rolling than planned. Hope nobody minds.
For now, matt and I are focused on improving usability and working out our payments functionality.
The biggest change is a new repo browser. Patch-tag no longer relies on gitit, though we are using a modified filestore module. How this came to be, and what it means for patch-tag users and pour future plans is a topic I hope to address in another blog post. The short and sweet is that I am a lot happier with the feel of repository browsing, and I think it was worth the work to switch from a pure open source community system.
In other news, swayed by recent developments in the darcs world, the ghc project has put their plans for switching from darcs to git indefinitely on hold.
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/May09
Git’s market is still 30X that of darcs according to google’s research tools, but definitely a shot in the arm for the “other” dvcs.
Hi, Thomas!
I like Patch-Tag. Just two wishes:
1. Add a link to feature requests/bug tracking of the project somewhere (I mean patch-tag). For example, you can add a UserVoice (http://uservoice.com/) widget quickly.
2. It would be nice to be able to see highlighted patches (diffs) when browsing history. Now it’s impossible to see what patch does what.
Dunno, so far the move away from gitit looks like a regression to me, in term of features (eg. the diffs already mentioned). Hopefully, that gets addressed in the future…
We do have file diffs (if you click on file history in the upper right-hand corner). But yes, we do need patch diffs, we will get this addressed asap.
Yeah, you’re right.
Just did some work on this. Testing, and will push something soon.
OK, pushed!
What do you think of the new diff functionality?
You can click one of the “hash” type links at, eg
http://patch-tag.com/r/happstack/snapshots/all/history
to see it in action.
Thank you! It’s better than nothing but still not perfect. Some remarks:
1) List of commits:
I often get 502 Proxy Error and the page loads slowly (http://patch-tag.com/r/happstack/snapshots/all/history)
Hashes are really long. Initial part of the hash duplicates the date. Probably it makes sense to visualize only the ending, like ‘…8fe174e57’ in the web UI.
Layout of the list of commits is less readable than on github or on bitbucket. There, hashes stay separately on the right and the list of updated files is shown only on the page with commit details. (http://github.com/ghc-hq/ghc/commits/master). But I think this will be polished in the future.
2) Commit page:
Striking out deleted text is not really a good idea: it is not clearly visible if the line strikes over the space or over the dash/minus sign. Better change background colour.
Browsing for changes through the whole big file is not very convenient. Diffs/patches are easier to read.
wdiffs are even better (github and bitbucket do it, really nice).
Line numbers may help in certain situations.