Hey! On Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 12:59:53PM -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
http://xmonad.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/bluetile-branch-merged-into-xmonad/
Again, wonderful work Jan. And looking forward to XMonad.Config.Bluetile :)
Thx for writing up that announcement and thank you and everybody else for the congratulations! :-) Joachim has already touched on the question of releasing a new version of xmonad and xmonad-contrib, so that Bluetile can depend on them. That would be my next question as well, as that would allow me to get rid of the bluetilebranch-stuff on hackage. But before that, it might be good to get a shared understanding of how Bluetile's future should look like. I think some people feel that Bluetile should just be completely merged into xmonad-contrib and cease to exist as a separate project. I can understand why they would like to 'tidy' things up, but I have to say that I think that this approach is completely incompatible with Bluetile's goals. Burying Bluetile somewhere in xmonad-contrib isn't my idea of a 'gentle learning curve'. Even if it becomes as easy as writing main = xmonad $ bluetileConfig in your configuration, it still is too difficult for the target audience I have in mind. I think of Bluetile as an interactive tiling window manager demo. I want people to be able to just say to a friend: "hey, if you want to get a feeling for twms, check out Bluetile." They 'apt-get' it (hopefully, in the future :-) ) and can play around with it - no documentation needed. If they get hooked, they can later move on from toy-Bluetile to full-blown-xmonad-proper. But that won't work if you have to say: "Hey, if you want to get a feeling for twms, check out xmonad and make sure you have a haskell compiler installed and put this line in your xmonad.hs before you start". And I think proof of this is the fact, that many people don't know that xmonad can easily integrate with GNOME just by putting 'main = xmonad $ gnomeConfig' in your configuration. I sometimes get e-mails from people telling me that they love the fact that Bluetile integrates with GNOME, which always prevented them from using xmonad. Well, xmonad can do it too of course, but because it positions itself as a minimal window manager, people aren't aware of it. So I think it's better to have two different 'brands', so to speak: Bluetile = interactive tiling window manager demo for someone who wants to play around with a TWM but has little time or incentive to do much configuration or read documentation. It makes the necessary trade-offs to lower the entry barrier as much as possible. xmonad = powerful tiling window manager framework which can do everything Bluetile can do and more, for those who are willing to put in some configuration effort. Those are the reasons why I feel Bluetile should continue to exist as a separate project. How do others on the list feel about this? If it indeed stays as a separate project, the only question is how much code remains only in Bluetile's repository. For now I have moved pretty much everything over to xmonad-contrib, except for a few things: The Bluetile dock application - this is very specific to Bluetile's config, so not really very flexible. It also requires gtk2hs. So I'm not sure it makes sense to put this in xmonad-contrib. It would add gtk2hs as a requirement to xmonad-contrib. The module BluetileCommands. This is pretty much just a list of hard-coded commands that are passed to ServerMode to give the dock a way to control Bluetile. The module BluetileDock. This writes status information to a pipe so that the Bluetile dock can receive it and display things like the current layout etc. Bluetile's actual config, making use of these three things and Bluetile-related stuff from xmonad-contrib. It seems like a good division to me, because all the very Bluetile-specific stuff is in the Bluetile repository and the more-or-less reusable modules have been moved over to xmonad-contrib. But maybe it would be a good idea to provide XMonad.Config.Bluetile in xmonad-contrib for someone who wants to move from Bluetile to xmonad proper and start out with the same configuration - albeit without Bluetile's dock. Opinions? :-) Regards, Jan