[xmonad] xmonad, and trends in the tiling wm market

[Don Stewart]

thomas.adam22:
> Hello --
> 
> On 08/12/2007, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> > We've not much information on what's happening with tiling wms. One
> > source of info is the debian package system's popularity contest: if a
> > package is in debian, we get to see a snapshot of trends.
> 
> Be careful with that -- the popularity contest is slightly
> hit-and-miss and might not accurately reflect xmonad's use.  What is
> it you're after though?  A comparison of how many users are
> *potentially* (that's the operative word here) are using xmonad?  How
> xmonad compares in development to other tiling WMs?  Whether or not
> people use it if the moon is waxing as opposed to it being a Tuesday
> and the local store run out of meatloaf again?

Right. It's hard to read too much global information into the debian
case, since it depends so much on package details on that system.
  
> In my mind, tracking something's use is best determined through
> feedback and nothing else.  I've watched xmonad grow for a long time,

Quite so. The mailing list and irc channel have continued to grow, for
example, which might be better indicators.

> and it's quite impressive; much quicker than a lot of other WMs that
> have sprung up.  But it's rather late to the party in many respects;
> what sets it apart from other WMs is not only the language it's
> written in (something of a triumph I'm sure, but not something I care

Indeed, we want to ensure that's not an issue. The language should only
matter in that we expect long term benefits in speed of development, and
safety, that should be the main result for language choice.

> about frankly), but also its operation of working; it's still
> fundamentally different from dwm for instance.

Oh, how so? I guess it has come a long way -- particular wrt.
extensibility.

-- Don