Some thoughts,
On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:32 AM, Braden Shepherdson
Hi,
Note first as a caveat that I've had three hours' sleep in the last 36. That said, I'm not the only person who thinks this is a good, and practical, idea.
Requiring GHC as a dependency is a real drag on evangelizing xmonad, and for adoption. The payout, of course, is having the full power of Haskell in our configurations. But GHC is a very, very heavy dependency for someone who doesn't already have it, and it raises the bar to running xmonad.
This led to the creation of PlainConfig, but while that removes the cost of GHC, it also sacrifices the benefit of powerful configuration. The new idea would allow users to keep all the benefits of Haskell config files without the cost of having GHC themselves.
We would present a web interface where a user can paste in their xmonad.hs (or maybe Browse... upload?), probably select release vs. darcs version, and then submit the form. The get back a download link to a compiled, standalone xmonad-i386-linux, the complete executable.
Different distros for various reasons may have different ways of having things compiled. I can't imagine this is as much of a problem for GHC, but it sometimes is a problem for other apps. Things compiled on one distro may not always work 100% on another distro. Perhaps waht you might want to do is include a series of sample configs, or even some kind of build daemon that can be packaged up on a per distro basis. Then, the xmonad package maintainers can include packages with prebuilt configs the user can choose from. The maintainer can also decide if it is a good idea to run the build daemon, and offer it as a service to the distro's users. Personally, I have no problem doing this for Fedora. I'm not sure we have the resources for a buildserver off hand, but including prebuilt configs is certainly an option. Just my 0,02 USD -Yaakov