[Xmonad] xmobar-0.7rc1 testers needed

[Andrea Rossato]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 06:19:13PM -0500, Spencer Janssen wrote:
> > BTW, I've been thinking about it, and I do not see any other possible
> > solution for the specific problem of blocking a thread and resuming it
> > in two different cases: an event *or* the elapsed time. You need the
> > real event or another thread that sends a fake event. Am I right?
> 
> It is possible, but annoying.  It requires a magic version of nextEvent that 
> doesn't block inside foreign calls.  Thankfully, this isn't so hard to write 
> with threadWaitRead and XPending.  With this magic nextEvent, we can use 
> asynchronous exceptions to interrupt the thread with a timer.  I've sent you 
> a patch that implements this.

I thought that having a thread send an XEvent to another thread was
hackish, but your solution is the haskeller's way to hackerdom...;-)

I think it is going to take me at least a couple of days to grasp your
code entirely, but it works perfectly without that 30% increase in
memory consumption.

Without you I just couldn't do it. Thanks!
 
> The next step, I think, is to remove the 'refresh' configuration entirely -- 
> just have plugins throw exceptions to the event/drawing thread whenever they 
> update.

Well, there is another use of refresh: in the output template you can
set unix commands, and have an empty "commands" list, such as:


Config { font = "-misc-fixed-*-*-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-*-*"
       , bgColor = "black"
       , fgColor = "grey"
       , xPos = 0
       , yPos = 0
       , width = 1024
       , height = 15
       , align = "right"
       , refresh = 10
       , commands = []
       , sepChar = "%"
       , template = "<fc=#ee9a00>%date%</fc> %uname%"
       }

In this case we need a global refresh option otherwise I need to hard
code a default value deep in the parsing routines. I don't think this
is a good idea.

Moreover, I think to have even monitors as plugins (enabled by
default, though), this way the user can build a very small xmobar,
with monitors disabled, just to run external unix commands.

Thanks for your help!

Andrea