Re: Vim 8 pre-announcement

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 06:43:47PM +0200, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
>
> Hello Vim users,
>
> Work on Vim 8.0 is coming close to an end. I hope version 8.0 can be
> released in about two weeks.
>
> This is a last chance to modify new features in a way that is not
> backwards compatible. Once 8.0 is out we can't make changes that would
> break plugins.
>
> An overview of new features can be found in:
> https://github.com/vim/vim/blob/master/runtime/doc/version8.txt

These are exciting changes! However, after reading through the help
text for 'packages', I was rather surprised by a few things. Primarily
the last advantage listed:

A package can contain plugins that are automatically loaded on
startup and ones that are only loaded when needed with `:packadd`.

As it currently stands, there are a variety of 'plugin managers' that,
it would seem, could be superseded by 'packages'. Unfortunately, of
all of the dozens of plugins I have enjoyed managing with these
managers,

- None are compatible with 'packages' because of the design of this
"advantage" (using start/ and opt/).
- None need it
- Maintaining backward compatibility looks troubling, to say the
least

The elegance of existing package managers is that plugins *are*
packages. 'packages' breaks that elegance.

In summary, every plugin I use today is not compatible with
'packages'. When vim8 is released, they will all have to be updated.
But I don't think they will be updated to support 'packages'. Instead,
I suspect their documentation will be updated to say, "Don't use
'packages'".

Thus, I am very interested to learn of the rationale for these design
decisions.

Sorry if this has been discussed to death elsewhere. This is the
second major release of vim that I've "lived through", but I'm new to
the mailing list. :)

-Bryan

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