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by dfc 4189 days ago 

  > Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s
  > pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase
  > small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions.
I never understood why the authors of dwm thought this was a "nice" feature of configuration via source code.
3 comments
ertdfgcb 4189 days ago
They don't mind if DWM is only ever used by a handful of people if only a handful of people agree with the principles behind it.
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vidarh 4189 days ago
Consider that their goal is not to have a huge community, but to have a piece of software that does what they want, and that dealing with a community is a lot of work. So they've chosen to use this as a filter in order to exclude people they perceive as causing more trouble than it's worth, and limit their community to people who pass through their "trial by fire" of having to be both willing and able to deal with compiling from source.
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sparkie 4188 days ago
The other kinds of configuration aren't that much better.

The most common method of configuration on linux is to include a parser for one of many shitty text or markup formats (whatever is currently "hip", so JSON at the moment), then carefully bind each variable you might want to modify to a key/value mapping extracted from the config file - and if you want to keep the sanity of your users, include verbose error messages or even a debugger so they can fix their inevitable typos.

The way configuration works on Windows and Mac is largely the same, except you wrap a GUI around the text file to handle the validation of inputs, which is a slight improvement over text input.

The problem with those input methods is they don't exactly allow you to configure much. You have to decide ahead of time all of the possible variables that one might want to change - and even then, you can't even compute new values to set the variables to, unless you embed an interpreter into your configuration format. As the program grows and gains more features, the configuration format needs amending, and grows uglier - which is what leads to Greenspun's tenth rule. Configuration files have their place - but most of the time, they're used where it'd be best to just have a programming language available.

I don't necessarily think dwm's idea of configuration via C is a great idea though, since they're not interpreting it and recompiling the whole program to make and test changes is a headache. Configuration via source code is the way to go, except it should be interpreted while the program is running, such that you only need to recompile for major breaking changes. Xmonad is configured via source code, but they have a separate process for your configuration, such that when you change it, the config is recompiled and the program relaunched without restarting the whole system. I'd personally opt to embed a Scheme into a WM, but that would probably go against suckless's minimalist philosophy.

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