[Xmonad] darcs patch: zombie_children

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2007 at 11:27:33AM -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
> dbenbenn:
> > On Nov 6, 2007 11:21 PM, Spencer Janssen <sjanssen at cse.unl.edu> wrote:
> > > Sadly, SIGCHLD doesn't seem to be a good solution here.  Certain parts of
> > > xmonad collect child processes with waitForProcess, which throws an exception
> > > if the process has already been collected.
> > 
> > Good point.  One of those places is in Main.hs, which waits for the
> > ghc process to recompile .xmonad/xmonad.hs.  That doesn't seem very
> > elegant, since the window manager is frozen until ghc finishes.  Seems
> > like that ought to be multithreaded, so the window manager can keep
> > responding during the compile.
> 
> Yes, I actually ran into that this morning. There was a 2 second delay
> I wasn't expecting as ghc swapped in. Maybe for we can avoid the call 
> in the unchanged xmonad.hs case, by checking stamps ourselves, rather 
> than asking ghc to do that.
> 
> Spencer, waddya think?

While we're at it, might we be able to be smarter than ghc, and look to see
if the xmc or xmonad packages have changed since the last compile?
Currently, we need to touch .xmonad/xmonad.hs on every recompile/restart,
which seems foolishly unnecessary.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University