Packaging dwm

[Petr Sabata]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 09:34:22PM -0400, Matt McCutchen wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-10-14 at 01:48 +0200, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > Petr Sabata wrote:
> > > I've been thinking about packaging dwm [1] since we already ship dmenu and
> > > dzen2. I wonder if anybody would be interested in this fine window manager
> > > (except for me).
> > 
> > I think it's completely unreasonable to package that software, because of 
> > this:
> > 
> > > The problem here: dwm is configured solely in C and has to be recompiled
> > > every time a user wants to change their settings (appearance, behavior,
> > > shortcuts, etc). In my opinion, we could do it like this:
> > > 
> > >     - install a Fedora preconfigured version along with dwm sources
> > >     - copy its configuration (C header file) to some fixed location for
> > >       user to customize
> > >     - provide a script to recompile dwm locally using the local
> > >       configuration file
> > 
> > Such a program is basically not packagable.
> 
> It can't be packaged in the sense of shipping binaries.  But if a
> wrapper script is provided that automatically recompiles dwm for the
> individual user whenever necessary, the software could be packaged in
> the sense that it could be installed and updated with yum and would be
> functional without user intervention.  The latter is my definition of
> "packageable".  Compare to the akmods offered by RPM Fusion.

I suppose rebuilding for every individual user would also be possible. I guess
the best way to do that without any user intervention would be to rebuild every
time a user's X session is started -- it's so small one would hardly notice it.

I created this draft based on my yesterdays email:
http://psabata.fedorapeople.org/dwm/dwm-5.8.2-1.fc13.src.rpm

However, there are some limitations when compared to your approach:
1. One has to manually call dwm-reconfigure to rebuild dwm with their
   configuration
2. All users in the system share the same settings (this is worse)

So, the new idea:

package dwm:
    - installs binaries with default configuration only
    - depends on dmenu and xterm
package dwm-user (or whatever):
    - installs dwm sources and a "dwm-start" script which:
        - checks for, say, ~/.dwm.config.def.h;
          runs default dwm if it's not present, or
          recompiles dwm in ~/.dwm with the user configuration and runs it
          if the config's there (and possibly has changed since the last
          time)
    - depends on dwm, gcc, make and Xlib-devel

Petr
> 
> -- 
> Matt
> 
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-- 
Petr 'contyk' Sabata, Red Hat, Brno

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