[Xmonad] Tabbed layout, xinerama, strange crashing

[David Roundy]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 04:37:31PM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> >> In general, stability seems to be the weakest point of xmonad at the
> >> moment--contrary to the advertizing.
> >
> >I disagree with this statement.  In general, xmonad's core has been very
> >stable.  All the crashes I've seen lately are due to buggy contrib
> >modules.
> 
> Perhaps you need to start "quality-controlling" the contrib module -
> ideally in an automated way. Are the contrib's pure, or do they
> involve the X layer? Could you quickcheck/catch them?

They involve the X layer (mostly).  That's where the bugs most often come
in, anyhow.  Which relates to why they're hard to keep from being buggy:
IO operations inherently are prone to throw exceptions.

Any chance catch can verify that an IO operation cannot fail? e.g. *I* know
that (getCurrentDirectory `catch` \_ -> return "foo") cannot fail, but does
Catch know that? Could it be taught?
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net