Re: Why Vimball archives are evil?

I'd prefer either:

An 'all-in' solution:
- vim.org gets a repository of plugins.
- vim gets a package/plugin manager just like Firefox, Chrome,
your-linux-distro-of-choice to update, find, install and uninstall
plugins. You'd no longer have to use the site for this - every use of
the site pertaining plugins is doable through this software.
- It would be awesome if this supported certain repositories as
sources (svn, git, mercurial, whathaveyou)

or:

a 'clean' solution:
- just use archive files.
- distribute them through vim.org.

I know there's vim plugins out there that do plugin managing, but I
think of these as a half solution because it's not part of vim itself.
It's not distributed with vim by default. I think the effort is great
though (keep it up :)) but something 'official' is preferrable.

I don't think the format of the archives matters at all, since that's
up to the plugin authors themselves. I don't think any vim user able
to install a plugin and use :help is incapable of finding out what to
use to open an archive, they are on vim.org already after all. I'd
pick tar.gz myself because it's free and works everywhere. You just
need an OS with tools installed to use it. I don't think that because
Windows has only zip support you should default to zip. This is a(n
eternal) windows problem and entirely in the hands of our capable
windows vim users to solve for using windows in the first place.

I don't see a reason for vimball to exist at all.. What's better then
extracting and archived files then extracting software? If we need vim
to extract the files (itself using, yes, an extractor) then maybe we
need a in-vim terminal, e-mail client and browser aswell.. just
kicking some hypothetical shins to make a point. The unix philosophy
:D

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 12:03 AM, Israel Chauca F.
<israelvarios@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> A short summary:
>
> A. 'Vimball is evil' arguments:
>  1. Binaries not supported.
>  2. "Bad" extension.
>  3. No compression.
>
> B. 'Vimball is good' arguments (couldn't find a better antonym for evil):
>  1. Easy to use.
>  2. Part of standard Vim distribution.
>  3. Plain text.
>  4. Destination of scripts can be specified.
>
> Point A.1 could be a problem and I doubt it can be easily fixed without adding dependencies, but most scripts are plain text only, so I don't see it as a big issue.
>
> The author has already offered to address A.2, which doesn't look like a mayor problem either.
>
> A.3 could be a problem for very slow connection downloading a very big vimball archive, a non so common situation given the size of scripts and current tipical bandwith used this days (a telephone modem would be fast enough for most plugins).
>
> So, I still don't get why there's opposition against vimball archives, they seem like a good option to distribute vim plugins.
>
> Israel
>
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