On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 10:14:31AM -0400, Allen S. Rout wrote:
Hi; I'm contemplating a tiling WM, and am drawn to xmonad because its customisation language is its implementation language; I'm long accustomed to this in e.g. EMACS, so I feel it'd be a good fit.
But a friend, who's otherwise an outspoken Haskell advocate, put xmonad down in favor of awesome for reasons I'll summarize as 'dependency hell'.
I'm interested in the perspective of the xmonad clan on this: If I pick up xmonad simply because I want a hackable WM, how much Haskell janitorial work will I be taking on? Is there a straightfoward and broadly accepted base of package repositories? Are the participants in the module ecosystem pretty careful not to break stuff? Do current versions of various xmonad packages all depend on the current versions of their dependencies?
Your friend must have stumbled upon a particularly bad combination of things; most people do not have that much trouble, I think. For the optimal xmonad experience with the least dependency hell: 1. Install the latest Haskell Platform (http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/). It may be available through your OS's package manager. This includes GHC and a bunch of common libraries and tools. (In particular, xmonad *doesn't* yet work well with GHC 7.2.1, so avoid that for now; use GHC 7.0.3 which is what comes with the latest Platform release.) 2. Run cabal install xmonad-contrib and sit back and watch xmonad and all its dependencies compile automatically. If you have trouble with this step (which I doubt) you can get help on this mailing list or in the #xmonad IRC channel on freenode.
From there you should be able to follow the instructions on the xmonad web site to get it configured and running, etc.
-Brent