[xmonad] xmonad for the Haskell unwashed?

[Troels Henriksen]

"Allen S. Rout" <asr at ufl.edu> writes:

> Hi; I'm contemplating a tiling WM, and am drawn to xmonad because its
> customisation language is its implementation language;  I'm long
> accustomed to this in e.g. EMACS, so I feel it'd be a good fit.

You should also consider StumpWM, it's more like Emacs (in that it can
be hacked at runtime) than Xmonad is: http://www.nongnu.org/stumpwm/

> But a friend, who's otherwise an outspoken Haskell advocate, put
> xmonad down in favor of awesome for reasons I'll summarize as
> dependency hell'.
>
> I'm interested in the perspective of the xmonad clan on this: If I
> pick up xmonad simply because I want a hackable WM, how much Haskell
> janitorial work will I be taking on?  Is there a straightfoward and
> broadly accepted base of package repositories?   Are the participants
> in the module ecosystem pretty careful not to break stuff?    Do
> current versions of various xmonad packages all depend on the current
> versions of their dependencies?

If you install cabal (a Haskell package manager), dependencies are not a
problem.  I have certainly noticed very few.  And even if you do not,
rather using adistribution-provided xmonad/xmonad-contrib packages,
those potential problems should already be taken care of.  In fact, when
configuring xmonad, you rarely care about new versions of things -
there's enough already-written stuff to pick from that it'll keep you
busy for quite a while.

-- 
\  Troels
/\ Henriksen