Well,

Am 04.07.22 um 14:43 schrieb Tony Zorman:

On Mon, Jul 04 2022 14:25, Michael Topp wrote:

if you're asking what distro maintains xmonad packages (the best), I 
count on Arch.

On the contrary, I think Arch is probably one of the worst options
around when talking about using XMonad via distro packages!

They update all official 'xmonad' packages frequently, because their 
haskell packages themselves also are updated quite often (could be once, 
twice a week).

XMonad on Arch is still stuck on 0.15 (0.16 for contrib); the new
release (0.17.0) has been out for almost a year by now!

Arch have updated their xmonad + xmonad-contrib packages to 0.17 now. Xmobar also gets updated regularly.

The reason Haskell packages on Arch update so frequently is because they
are rebuilding all of the dependencies of a package when they update it.
This could be a random library anywhere in the dependency tree—probably
not an update to xmonad or xmonad-contrib itself.  The reason for this
is that Arch links Haskell binaries dynamically instead of statically
(which is the default on pretty much any other distro; for obvious
reasons, I think).

So what? That's just why the distros behave kind of conservative here; they don't provide Haskell stuff only because of XMonad.

 One of the side effects of this is that people have
to recompile their configs with every bump.  If they forget to do that
then they could get sent straight back to the TTY when logging in.
Seemingly, sometimes people also forget to bump some dependencies,
leading to lots of broken xmobar's etc.  Not a fun experience.

Nope, this only happens if you don't read the excellent Arch-Wiki thoroughly:

[ https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xmonad#Problems_with_finding_shared_libraries_after_update ]

Simply create a pacman-hook to automatically rebuild the xmonad.hs after every update; very convenient.

Compilation will break nonetheless if the xmonad.hs contains errors and/or is (too) outdated. However if this happens while already being in X(monad), I am not being send to TTY.

Alternatively you can make your own local xmonad build, independent
from the distro. And sure, you also have to decide which compiler to
use. I highly recommend consulting the wikis from both Arch Linux and
Xmonad.

If you use [our build instructions], then stack will pick which version
of GHC to use; you don't need to think about it.  It's also much more
up-to-date than both wikis.

I don't think the distribution matters much when using stack (or even
nix), but then we're also not talking about distro packages anymore.

  Tony

[our build instructions]: https://xmonad.org/INSTALL.html

Yw, with "locally" I was also referring to this, though it's not explicitly called a "wiki".
I was just too lazy not to launch my browser on my slow old machine for c&p-ing links; sorry for that.

Anyway I once of course read "[our build instructions]" – and decided against stack or cabal, but rather staying with the stock distro packages.

Because at least for Arch it works! And because I didn't want to have another local parallel universe in my system or learn about ghc's, stack's etc. apps' other peculiarities, since I use some more apps built on haskell, too. – I have also got other things to do. So I don't mind if my Haskell or XMonad packages onboard are a minor-minor-version/s behind.

Btw whether to build/install XMonad with non-conform methods skipping the distro's global package management was not the question. The OP asked:

> Which distro to folks use with xmonad? Where is it best supported?

So again +1 for Arch!

Regards,

Michael