Re: [wmii] Preparation for 3.7 Release.

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 05:15:29PM +0800, sqweek wrote:
>* Event-Notice: nice idea, dicey implementation... I implemented
>something similar as a seperate action awhile back, that would
>remember the last 10 messages and cycle on mouse clicks. Never got
>around to sharing (or using) it.

Yeah, the implementation is... wierd. I just ripped it out of
one of my scripts, because it seemed general enough to be useful
(it's in my volume changer, for instance). I don't want anything
fancier, but something less 'dicey' would be great, if anyone
wants to provide it. It works, as is.

>* LBarMenu-3-Delete: Guess what function got unbound as soon as I noticed it? :P
> The generalised menu interface is kind of nice though.

It actually turns out to be useful. I'll take it out of the base
rc.wmii if enough other people think it should go. It's pretty
long.

>* /tags/1 exists even with no clients now?

Yeah, it caused too much trouble, before. Plus, it only ever
lasted until you either opened a client, or selected a view.

>* # For the time being, this file follows the lisp bracing convention.
> This comment totally failed to surprise me; after debugging a couple
>of things and absorbing the scripts, the *code* started reminding me
>of lisp. I half suspect you'll take that as a compliment, but it got
>me wondering... Why are we using rc? rc's forte is environment
>manipulation and process spawning, not meta programming and api
>construction (ok, rc.wmii does its fair share of the former aswell).
>In fact, considering the interface now provided by wmii.rc, I wonder
>why we use 9p at all. wmii could be using any sort of RPC protocol
>behind wi_foo and no one would know the difference. The greatest one
>for me was:

That's true, but the 9p RPC protocol is simple and poratable.
There are several other implementations. Shells actually turn
out to work surprisingly well for metaprogramming... You just
have to pretend that they're tcl.

>fn wi_readevent {
> wmiir read /event
>}
>
> What. The. Hell. wi_readevent is referenced exactly once, for those wondering.
> I suspect this is half the point - hide details of the 9p interface
>behind a "nice" rc interface.

Nope, that's not it at all. That actually probably shouldn't be
there, but I needed it for one of my scripts that has a timer,
and sends Tick events periodically. I was thinking about adding
that to wmii.rc.

>But isn't that the exact point of 9p? To
>hide the details of X11 and window management behind a "nice" 9p
>interface? The mere existance of wmii.rc just screams at me "Why, WHY?
>Why do we need this extra level of indirection?" The obvious
>conclusion is that our current 9p interface sucks, but I wonder if
>there aren't other factors...

It's not about indirection, it's about verbosity. I got tired of
seeing "wmiir read /foo/bar | awk '{some other crap}'" repeated.
wmii.rc is only meant to capture common idioms. It probably
needs to be scaled back a bit.

I haven't read uriel's reply to this. I suspect that I should
just delete it.
Received on Thu May 29 2008 - 23:15:45 UTC