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

[Michael Topp]

Well,

Am 04.07.22 um 14:43 schrieb 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!

Arch have updated their xmonad + xmonad-contrib packages to 0.17 now. 
Xmobar also gets updated regularly.

> 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).
So what? That's just why the distros behave kind of conservative here; 
they don't provide Haskell stuff only because of XMonad.

>   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.
Nope, this only happens if you don't read the excellent Arch-Wiki 
thoroughly:

[ 
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xmonad#Problems_with_finding_shared_libraries_after_update 
]

Simply create a pacman-hook to automatically rebuild the xmonad.hs after 
every update; very convenient.

Compilation will break nonetheless if the xmonad.hs contains errors 
and/or is (too) outdated. However if this happens while already being in 
X(monad), I am /not/ being send to TTY.

>> 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
>    
Yw, with "locally" I was also referring to this, though it's not 
explicitly called a "wiki".
I was just too lazy not to launch my browser on my slow old machine for 
c&p-ing links; sorry for that.

Anyway I once of course read "[our build instructions]" – and decided 
/against/ stack or cabal, but rather staying with the stock distro 
packages.

Because at least for Arch it works! And because I didn't want to have 
another local parallel universe in my system or learn about ghc's, 
stack's etc. apps' other peculiarities, since I use some more apps built 
on haskell, too. – I have also got other things to do. So I don't mind 
if my Haskell or XMonad packages onboard are a minor-minor-version/s behind.

Btw whether to build/install XMonad with non-conform methods skipping 
the distro's global package management was not the question. The OP asked:

/> Which distro to folks use with xmonad?  Where is it best supported? /

So again +1 for Arch!


Regards,

Michael


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