On 4 May 2012 11:14, Gwern Branwen wrote:

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 8:47 PM, David McLean wrote:

...

 Regrettably, this does break compatibility with any previously-defined custom  urgency hooks, since the UrgencyHook typeclass no longer exists.

How many configs in the Config Archive does this patch break?

Since the urgency hooks are now values, and not types, the old hook names (FocusHook, NoUrgencyHook, etc.) no longer exist. Thus, all the configurations specifying any such hook name now fail. Of the darcs XMonad configurations, six of ten will be broken. Which I'll admit is not great. However, none of these configurations have defined any custom UrgencyHook instances, so the changes required are fairly minor, in some cases just changing the capitalisation to reference value rather than type.

Gwern Branwen [2012.05.03 2213 -0400]:

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 9:35 PM, David McLean wrote:

...

Of the darcs XMonad configurations, six of ten will be broken. Which I'll admit is not great. However, none of these configurations have defined any custom UrgencyHook instances, so the changes required are fairly minor, in some cases just changing the capitalisation to reference value rather than type.

$ g -l [^\.]Hook *.hs|sort -u|wc 68 68 399

Yeah, I'm not pushing a patch breaking 68 configs without a lot more feedback from Xmonaders in general.

It would certainly also break my config, even though it's not published anywhere, and I would suspect that I'm by far not the only xmonad user who doesn't publish his config. My reaction to this patch is: I'm willing to live with the breakage (since it's a one-time fix I need to apply to my xmonad.hs) under two conditions: * We're convinced that the change this patch introduces is beneficial in the long run (I'm semi-convinced by the patch message that this is the case). * The patch author should make sure that all uses of urgency hooks in the darcs repository get converted to the new interface. (When I worked on my (for now on hold) rewrite of the Decoration module, I went through all modules that used it and made sure they work.) I think it would be a very bad idea to have broken config examples in the repository. Cheers, Norbert