[xmonad] Ubuntu, Xmonad, and Xinerama

[David Roundy]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:00:00AM -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
> droundy:
> > On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 11:20:17AM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> > > > Is it possible that having a custom ~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs that wasn't
> > > > changed across updates could cause xinerama to fail because
> > > > ~/.xmonad/xmonad-i386-linux doesn't get rebuilt?
> > > 
> > > Quite possible, happens to me all the time :-)
> > 
> > Someone really should figure out how to build software reliably using ghc
> > packages.  This is just embarassing.  And then we could tell the cabal
> > folks how to do this.
> 
> If in doubt, recompile.
> 
> > I understand that dons is reluctant to load up ghc every time xmonad loads,
> > but perhaps we could figure out some way to track the modification date of
> > the xmonad and/or xmonad-contrib packages and recompile if those have
> > changed.
> 
> that's a long open ticket for cabal, and I'm not keen to duplicate that
> for xmonad.
>  
> we have a simple policy: look only at xmonad.hs, and compile if it
> is out of date. that's the only rule. anything else is duplicating
> --make and chunks of cabal in an ad hoc way.

I disagree.  We wouldn't (currently) be duplicating any code in --make or
cabal, since both of those don't handle this situation correctly.
Moreover, since we don't intend to use either --make or cabal when
rebuilding xmonad.hs, it seems reasonable to use a slightly more
sophisticated heuristic to remove a pot-hole that many, many users and
developers fall into.  It is the very unintuitive that every upgrade of
xmonad requires a modification of the configuration file in order to take
effect.
-- 
David Roundy
Department of Physics
Oregon State University