On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 05:18:06PM -0500, Brent Yorgey wrote:
Hi all,
I was just talking with cce in #xmonad, who suggested that it would be nice if xmonad, when starting up, checked for the presence of xmonad.hs in ~/.xmonad/ and installed the template xmonad.hs if it's not there. Especially for those installing xmonad via a packaged distribution, it may not be immediately obvious how to start configuring xmonad, where to put xmonad.hs, and so on. I thought I'd run this idea by the list to see what people think before I implement it... perhaps there's a good reason it doesn't do this already.
-Brent
We ought to look at precedent from most other Unix tools -- they don't install stub configuration files and I think there are good reasons behind that. Consider a user that tries xmonad, but then decides in the end that it isn't for them. We shouldn't leave ~/.xmonad cruft (probably including a 3MB cached binary!) behind. Rather than install boilerplate configuration files in every user's home directory, we should use our prominent documentation locations (the manpage and xmonad.org) to point to an example config. Cheers, Spencer Janssen