[xmonad] darcs patch: Shell.hs: getEditor/Browser changes

[Jamie Webb]

On 2008-04-03 21:49:51 gwern0 at gmail.com wrote:
> No, it doesn't. I thought about it and:
> 
> #You could penalize every user like myself using a sensible editor
> which can handle the CLI *and* X (shocking) with a bogus terminal,
> which is silly # You could try doing a runOrRaise on every editor,
> pause _n_ seconds, and then do a raiseMaybe (term ++ " -e " ++
> editor). I don't need to explain why this is bad. # You could somehow
> try to make spawn smarter - spawn is, so far as I know, dumb. If a
> program exits immediately because there's no shell to run in because
> the user is in X, that's all the same to spawn. ## Of course, you'd
> then need to rewrite the entire RunOrRaise stack and stuff, since
> spawn isn't threaded through as a modifiable parameter. # You could
> try something with exceptions. No idea what - the obvious thing would
> be if spawn could throw exceptions when the program exist. But spawn
> is hardwired to use doubleFork which is hardwired to return
> ExitSuccess. ## You want to make spawn throw exceptions so you could
> just go 'catch (runOrRaise (getEditor)) (spawn "xterm -e " ++
> getEditor)'? Good luck making that and updating everything and
> getting it into the core.
> 
> So basically, I don't see any clean solution. If you have an unusual
> case, just use 'runOrRaise (unusualCase)', or set the environment
> variables to a script or anything. The primitives are exposed for a
> reason; 80/20 you know.
> 
> Of course, if anyone does know a clean solution, that'd be good. I am
> not in principle against handling that sort of case well (although
> perhaps we can agree that hooking into GNOME and KDE configuration
> databases to discover the default browser and editor would be going
> too far :).

I think you've just explained why your patch is a bad idea...

Much better to let the user set this stuff up so it works. It's not
exactly hard.

/J