Re: [dwm] dwm-5.3

On Dec 6, 2008, at 10:20 AM, Guillaume Quintin wrote:

> Why don't we change the way dwm gets its status text ? For example
> we could use the SIGALRM signal to call a "spawn2" :

--snip--

> This will take only a few LOC, because all the reading p[0] part
> will be in fact the reading-stdin code from the run() function which
> will not be needed anymore. This has the advantages that one can
> change
> the status when dwm is running and there are no more "quitting"
> problem. This is just an idea, forgive me not to propose some real
> code. Well tell me what you think of this idea.

I'm not sure that changing the status script when dwm is running is a
big advantage. I'm already used to recompiling if I want to change
any setting. :)

The disadvantage of this approach is that the status script would
have to do a lot of work to maintain any state. Most people run
"date", "acpi" and other commands once a second, this would be fine
for them.

My status text includes the weather (updated only every 15min to
avoid hammering their servers), and the time (updated once a minute,
on the minute, to reduce my wakeups-per-second in PowerTOP). For me,
this SIGALRM and spawn2 would require that I store some temporary
data somewhere between invocations.

Here's my status script in case anyone would be interested. It
basically merges different status areas with arbitrary update
intervals for each.