On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 11:33 AM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey@seas.upenn.edu> wrote:

2. At a more fundamental level--and I realize I am bordering on
heresy here--*why* do we care about making it easy for people who
don't want to install ghc to run xmonad? I'm not saying there
aren't any good answers to this question, just that it should be
considered seriously.

THANK YOU.

All of this bullshit evangelizing (mostly from non-coders) in the free software community has been getting obnoxious. The last thing small community projects need is influxes of clueless users attracted to the *marketing* instead of the functionality.

The ghc dependency is the foundation of what makes xmonad unique -- the fact that the 'config file' is actually the program itself.

If it didn't have that fundamental design, the implementation language wouldn't matter at all from a user perspective. Without it and the functionality it enables, the only other feature that really differentiates it from other tiling window managers is the way it handles Xinerama (independent viewports onto a pool of desktops), and that's broken on Debian because of their usual packaging bullshit ;)

-- Fred