[xmonad] Bluetile

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:01 PM, Don Stewart<dons at galois.com> wrote:
> gwern0:
>> So to conclude this whirlwind tour: I see a lot of valuable stuff.
>>
>> The greeter is something that could definitely be in core (although I
>> think the gtk2hs dep is untenable, so I expect a better idea would be
>> to run an xmessage prompt with a list of keybindings). The dock is a
>> nice alternative to the ridiculously baroque setups for xmobar and
>> dzen - those may be really nice and customizable, but they are
>> absolutely unsuitable for beginners, and even setting up a Gnome panel
>> is a bit much for non-intermediate or advanced XMonaders.
>
> Ok. So a good contrib module.

No, not a good contrib module at all. If the idea is to help
beginners, then putting it in contrib makes it useless.

It'd be like writing a Haskell guide for beginners, except the first
10 chapters assume you know GADTs and System F - something to help
beginners must be by default and not optional. If it was optional, it
will either go unused or will be used by users savvy enough to know
about it, track it down, and enable it, users who likely don't need
it.

Even spinning off an 'xmonad-newbie' is suboptimal, since again, a
user savvy enough to know they don't want 'xmonad' but some obscure
fork or variant (even generously assuming it gets packaged up and as
widely available as the original) is a user who doesn't much need it.

-- 
gwern