Re: [Xmonad] dynamic configuration? (e.g. hsplugins)

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 02:27:58PM -0500, Spencer Janssen wrote:

David Roundy wrote:

...

I know others here have far more experience in this arena than I do, but are there any plans to support hsplugins or the ghc api, or just plain running under ghci, so that a recompile-reinstall cycle won't be necesary to update one's configuration? I'd assume this'd be in the works for version 0.7 or so, but thought I might as well ask.

0.7? I don't think any of us have planned that far ahead :).

I think the current 'restart' (serialize state, exec, deserialize) is more promising than dynamic code reloading. We just need to make additional pieces of state serializable (layouts, especially).

You can cut out the reinstall stage by pointing 'restart' straight at your xmonad repo. You can skip the recompilation step by telling restart to 'runghc my/xmonad/dir/Main.hs'.

Ah, that's what I haven't tried. That almost seems to get us there--but not really, as you still need one copy of the source code per user, and the user interface actually becomes worse than compiling by hand, rather than better. It leaves us with xmonad having no way to gracefully exit in case of syntax error. I'd prefer if xmonad itself could do the compiling, and in case of an error in ~/.xmonad/Config.hs it would fall back on using /etc/xmonad/Config.hs (or whatever), and displaying an appropriate error message to the user (and if /etc/xmonad/Config.hs fails to compile, it'd fall back on /usr/share/xmonad/Config.hs). It'd be nice to know that there's a plan (or at least desire) to make xmonad useable by folks who aren't willing to compile their own software, and who don't think that one copy of each program per user is a good idea. -- David Roundy Department of Physics Oregon State University