[xmonad] Fwd: Re: xmonad packages broken in Debian

[Tony Zorman]

On Mon, Jul 04 2022 14:25, Michael Topp wrote:
> if you're asking what distro maintains xmonad packages (the best), I 
> count on Arch.

On the contrary, I think Arch is probably one of the worst options
around when talking about using XMonad via distro packages!

> They update all official 'xmonad' packages frequently, because their 
> haskell packages themselves also are updated quite often (could be once, 
> twice a week).

XMonad on Arch is still stuck on 0.15 (0.16 for contrib); the new
release (0.17.0) has been out for almost a year by now!

The reason Haskell packages on Arch update so frequently is because they
are rebuilding all of the dependencies of a package when they update it.
This could be a random library anywhere in the dependency tree—probably
not an update to xmonad or xmonad-contrib itself.  The reason for this
is that Arch links Haskell binaries dynamically instead of statically
(which is the default on pretty much any other distro; for obvious
reasons, I think).  One of the side effects of this is that people have
to recompile their configs with every bump.  If they forget to do that
then they could get sent straight back to the TTY when logging in.
Seemingly, sometimes people also forget to bump some dependencies,
leading to lots of broken xmobar's etc.  Not a fun experience.

> Alternatively you can make your own local xmonad build, independent
> from the distro. And sure, you also have to decide which compiler to
> use. I highly recommend consulting the wikis from both Arch Linux and
> Xmonad.

If you use [our build instructions], then stack will pick which version
of GHC to use; you don't need to think about it.  It's also much more
up-to-date than both wikis.

I don't think the distribution matters much when using stack (or even
nix), but then we're also not talking about distro packages anymore.

  Tony

[our build instructions]: https://xmonad.org/INSTALL.html
  
-- 
Tony Zorman | https://tony-zorman.com/