[Xmonad] possible bug in tabbed window extension

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 07:53:07AM +0100, Jamie Webb wrote:
> On 2007-10-05 12:52:05 Andrea Rossato wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 02:48:29AM -0700, Michael Vanier wrote:
> > >  I've just upgraded to the latest xmonad in darcs, and it's great!
> > > However, one thing that used to work doesn't work anymore.  I bind
> > > mod-button3 to the kill command, and when I put the cursor on a tab
> > > and hit mod-button3 the entire X server crashes!  When I do it
> > > outside of a tab it works fine. FWIW the relevant part of my
> > > Config.hs is:
> > > 
> > [...]
> > >  Anybody have any idea what's going wrong?
> > 
> > yes, a stupid assumption I made when using fromJust a bit too
> > liberally.
> 
> I wonder: would it be feasible to sandbox layouts (and other 'user'
> code) somewhat, so that a bug like this would perhaps just cause Xmonad
> to switch to Full rather than blowing away the session? It would make
> experimenting a bit less troublesome.

I haven't been following this bug, but we certainly used to have precisely
this sandbox in place, and it definitely worked.  It involves catchX, and I
think the code is still there, but someone may have removed it from one of
the invocations.  My feeling is that any X code (or ideally any pure code)
that is not part of core should be called with catchX whenever possible.
Haskell has all the infrastructure needed to very easily do this kind of
sandboxing (exceptions).
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University