[xmonad] does it make any sense?

[Andrea Rossato]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 12:17:27PM -0500, Brent Yorgey wrote:
> 2. People who know a bit of Haskell and want to get a bit fancier with their
> configuration, or write some new extensions.
> 
> Andrea, it seems that this is the kind of thing you have started putting in
> Documentation.hs (starting with the section "Writing new extensions"), but I
> think this should probably go on the wiki instead.  The problem is that I
> think this document, written properly, will be VERY long!

Well, what I have in mind is a brief (really) overview of the xmonad's
internal working with reference (links) to the (quite good, I would
say) haddock documentation of the code: main (now xmonad), the event
handler, the X monad, and the layout type stuff.

About the last one, I don't know, maybe I'm just plainly wrong, but
after the LayoutClass change, with the 0.4 release, I had the feeling
that new modules contributions have decreased - we would need one of
those Don's graphs to verify this... I repeat, I may be wrong, but I
think that all the type class stuff could be difficult to grasp to the
coders who could be contributing code for xmonad.

I think that a brief introduction for them could be helpful too. What
do you think? Am I wrong with that?

> I actually care very much about such a document and have a great vision of
> what it could be, since I essentially started writing such a document a
> couple months ago!  I started going through the xmonad source in order to
> understand it, and, encouraged by Don, began writing an 'xmonad
> commentary'.  I already have a bunch of commentary on StackSet, but have put
> it on hold due to grad school apps, the big changes with 0.5, and so on.
> Hopefully sometime soon I will have a chance to upload what I have to the
> wiki so that others can work on it too.  My vision for this commentary is
> that someone who knows some basic Haskell could read it and come away with
> (a) a much deeper understanding of Haskell and the sorts of techniques that
> are used; (b) an excitement for Haskell and what it makes possible, with
> xmonad as a case study; and (c) (last but not least) the ability to
> contribute new extension modules and so on.

That would be really great I think, and if I had the time I would have
started something like this. Please consider the possibility of
starting it on the wiki, I could be helping somehow.

Cheers,
Andrea