[Xmonad] Tabbed layout, xinerama, strange crashing

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 06:29:38PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> > The problem is that very little of xmonad's code is in its core.  The
> > pleasant aspect of xmonad (or rather, what I wished I had with ion3) is the
> > nice interface for extending and customizing it.  When that nice interface
> > causes xmonad to crash when you make a mistake, it's not so nice.  I end up
> > keeping an ion3 open for editing xmonad, because xmonad is so unstable.
> 
> You mean, because you can hack internal structures however you want, so
> you can break things? The xmonad core is *not* xmonad + random
> extensions. And random extensions -- now they're in X -- can crash the
> system if you want.
> 
> "xmonad is so unstable" isn't the right way to talk about arbitrary, deep
> customisation, and its inherant ability to break things.

But we're haskell developers, we should hold ourselves to higher
standards.  We've got powerful static typechecking, and you claim that
xmonad has a clean well-tested design.  In my opinion a good design for an
extensible system involves making it *robustly* extensible, and that's
where xmonad falls down.  When it's safer to modify a program extensible in
lua than one extensible in haskell, it means we're doing a pathetic job,
and not making proper use of our language.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net