[Xmonad] dynamic configuration? (e.g. hsplugins)

[David Roundy]

On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 02:27:58PM -0500, Spencer Janssen wrote:
> David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> > I know others here have far more experience in this arena than I do,
> > but are there any plans to support hsplugins or the ghc api, or just
> > plain running under ghci, so that a recompile-reinstall cycle won't
> > be necesary to update one's configuration? I'd assume this'd be in
> > the works for version 0.7 or so, but thought I might as well ask.
> 
> 0.7?  I don't think any of us have planned that far ahead :).
> 
> I think the current 'restart' (serialize state, exec, deserialize) is
> more promising than dynamic code reloading.  We just need to make
> additional pieces of state serializable (layouts, especially).
> 
> You can cut out the reinstall stage by pointing 'restart' straight at
> your xmonad repo.  You can skip the recompilation step by telling
> restart to 'runghc my/xmonad/dir/Main.hs'.

Ah, that's what I haven't tried.  That almost seems to get us there--but
not really, as you still need one copy of the source code per user, and
the user interface actually becomes worse than compiling by hand, rather
than better.

It leaves us with xmonad having no way to gracefully exit in case of syntax
error.  I'd prefer if xmonad itself could do the compiling, and in case of
an error in ~/.xmonad/Config.hs it would fall back on using
/etc/xmonad/Config.hs (or whatever), and displaying an appropriate error
message to the user (and if /etc/xmonad/Config.hs fails to compile, it'd
fall back on /usr/share/xmonad/Config.hs).

It'd be nice to know that there's a plan (or at least desire) to make
xmonad useable by folks who aren't willing to compile their own software,
and who don't think that one copy of each program per user is a good idea.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University