[xmonad] Small announce about the completion of the bluetile merge

[Jan Vornberger]

Hi!

On Wed, Dec 09, 2009 at 08:17:59PM +0100, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> The dock application seems to be self-contained, i.e. has no dependency
> on xmonad code. It probably is useful on its own, e.g. for people doing
> their own configuration, right? But I guess it is not useful for
> non-xmonad-users, right?

It isn't very flexible at the moment. But yes, I suppose it could be
useful for xmonad-users on its own in some cases.

> Is bluetilemockwin useful for anyone but developers creating
> screencasts?

Yes, the greeter application allows you to open a few windows which starts
a few of these bluetilemockwins. The idea is, that you can then start
playing around with the layouts and see the effect very clearly.
So it should be part of bluetile-utils.

> For Debian, I’d say I create bluetile-utils package from the bluetile
> hackage package, containing bluetiledock and bluetilegreet, and build
> the bluetile package from the xmonad-contrib source, which then depends
> on bluetile-utils. This way, I would not have to recompile bluetiledock
> or bluetilegreet just because a part of the xmonad code gets upgraded.
> Does this make sense?

For the most part yes - but Bluetile has it's own Main.hs and it is a
little bit more elaborated then just doing 'main = xmonad
bluetileConfig'. For example, it also checks if gnome-terminal is
available and falls back to xterm if that is not the case. It also
starts the helper applications and displays some start-up information.
So I think it would be better to build the bluetile package from the
bluetile hackage package.
(About the terminal thing: That might be an opportunity to use Debian's
x-terminal-emulator or some such thing. Let me know if I can make such
'debanization' easier in any way.)

I hope that's not confusing? You can have a look at the current state of
the code here:

  http://code.haskell.org/~jav/bluetile/

This is the new version that depends on xmonad mainline. (On the website
the old repositories are still linked, because that's what is on hackage
at the moment).

If I may ask: You seem to be doing a lot of cutting and slicing. :-) I
trust you know what you are doing, as you have experience with packaging
for Debian, but does this really make things easier? A release of
xmonad will always require a release of bluetile, so why not just keep
the helper applications in that same package and just recompile them in
the same go. It doesn't hurt, does it?

Actually, the helper applications did live in an extra repository called
bluetile-utils at some point. So I guess we are thinking alike. :-) But
then I decided to just merge them into one repository to have less
things to manage.
It also opens the possibility to integrate the dock closer with the rest
of the code. Right now it's self-contained, but at some point I might
make it aware of things like how many workspaces are configured in
bluetileConfig to adjust accordingly. That would break the bluetile vs.
bluetile-utils separation, I suppose, and I don't want to create extra
work for you.

So yeah, just curious what your motivation behind it is? But do as you
see fit and let me know how I can help! :-)

Regards,

Jan