[xmonad] A New Solution to Removing the GHC Dependency

[Yaakov Nemoy]

Some thoughts,

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 5:32 AM, Braden Shepherdson
<Braden.Shepherdson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Note first as a caveat that I've had three hours' sleep in the last 36. That
> said, I'm not the only person who thinks this is a good, and practical,
> idea.
>
> Requiring GHC as a dependency is a real drag on evangelizing xmonad, and for
> adoption. The payout, of course, is having the full power of Haskell in our
> configurations. But GHC is a very, very heavy dependency for someone who
> doesn't already have it, and it raises the bar to running xmonad.
>
> This led to the creation of PlainConfig, but while that removes the cost of
> GHC, it also sacrifices the benefit of powerful configuration. The new idea
> would allow users to keep all the benefits of Haskell config files without
> the cost of having GHC themselves.
>
> We would present a web interface where a user can paste in their xmonad.hs
> (or maybe Browse... upload?), probably select release vs. darcs version, and
> then submit the form. The get back a download link to a compiled, standalone
> xmonad-i386-linux, the complete executable.

Different distros for various reasons may have different ways of
having things compiled.  I can't imagine this is as much of a problem
for GHC, but it sometimes is a problem for other apps.  Things
compiled on one distro may not always work 100% on another distro.


Perhaps waht you might want to do is include a series of sample
configs, or even some kind of build daemon that can be packaged up on
a per distro basis.  Then, the xmonad package maintainers can include
packages with prebuilt configs the user can choose from.  The
maintainer can also decide if it is a good idea to run the build
daemon, and offer it as a service to the distro's users.

Personally, I have no problem doing this for Fedora.  I'm not sure we
have the resources for a buildserver off hand, but including prebuilt
configs is certainly an option.

Just my 0,02 USD

-Yaakov