nzeh:
- Norbert Zeh tracked and fixed a longstanding bug that made xmobar leak X resources. This alone makes it worth this release and its public announcement, with the advice to users to upgrade.[*]
[*] I tend to believe the same issue affects xmonad, even though it should be visible only after a huge number of restarts. Things get far worse when it comes to the xmonad-contrib library, especially if you use fancy decorations in your layouts: if you see colors you are probably leaking them.
After discussing this with Andrea, I looked briefly into fixing this (for xmonad core right now). The reason why I didn't do it was that (a) as Andrea points out, only a huge number of restarts will make this problem show and (b) it seems much harder to fix than in xmobar, the reason being that the usage of allocated colors in xmobar is *much* more localized than in xmonad. Fixing this in xmonad would require small changes throughout the code base, I believe---minor ones, but still.
In fact, I strongly believe that the whole issue should in fact be fixed in the haskell bindings for X11. One thing I like about high-level languages such as Haskell is that I don't have to worry about allocating memory etc. The garbage collector takes care of it. Along the same line, it would have been nice if the Haskell binding for XAllocNamedColor (and its relatives) returned a Haskell object that calls XFreeColors automatically once the garbage collector gets rid of the object.
Right, the last thing sounds like the right approach. -- Don