Re: [xmonad] darcs patch: XMonad.Core: make spawn smarter

On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 11:15:10AM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:

On 2008.09.26 21:38:54 -0400, "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" scribbled 0.9K characters:

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On 2008 Sep 26, at 21:11, Devin Mullins wrote:

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On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 06:04:54PM -0400, Gwern Branwen wrote:

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A user's shell when invoked as /bin/sh throws away a lot of their customizations and addons; I wrote this patch for a user on #xmonad who was perplexed why some of his scripts and other shell things were simply Not Working.

Hrm, that makes sense. If you're used to some particular bash-only syntax, you might expect it to work inside spawn.

Traditional Unix behavior is that something spawned programmatically should use /bin/sh to get a consistent environment, while something spawned via user interaction should use the user's $SHELL. Quite possibly the core spawn should stay as is and the prompt one should use a new $SHELL-based spawn (note that this can be done as a wrapper around the existing spawn).

-- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com

Sticking to hardcore traditional Unix behavior would be fine if we were unpleasant Dwm developers.

We could be all 'ROFL n00b, don't u know if you don't want /bin/sh you should write your own keybinding which uses "spawnObscure"? Why would you think the default spawn would act smart and work with your existing setup?'

Or, we could be friendly & helpful & make a simple 1 or 2 line change and never have to discuss it again. I don't see any real upside to the 'consistent environment' of /bin/sh; if anything, going through $SHELL is what would provide a 'consistent environment', since what the user is actually using and running in is $SHELL.

-- gwern

Here is a keybinding in defaultConfig: spawn "exe=`dmenu_path | dmenu` && eval \"exec $exe\"" I'm not an expert, but I believe there are shells where this is incorrect syntax. This is why it is important to have a consistent environment -- we ought to be able to write spawn expressions in the core and contrib and expect them to work everywhere. This is how I propose we move forward: * reject this patch to the core * document the fact that XMonad.spawn uses /bin/sh * add spawnShell (or some better name) to XMonad.Util.Run which executes its argument in $SHELL. Also, this insinuation that we hate our users is not fair, and certainly doesn't further discussion in any meaningful way. Cheers, Spencer Janssen