Friday, July 1, 2011

vim plugins & www.vim.org - future

I've been thinking about how to optimize that user find plugins
- and how to make it easier for devs to expose their plugins to the
public (of course this should be better than google).

And the result is: Do it like google: Ask authors to register their
upstream (git,svn,hg,..) urls and be done. The page should fetch updates
and generate the content based on the repos. Eg those who are hosted on
github already have a README.* file which could be used to render
content. the doc/*.txt files could be used to render the description
(and details). Its horrific that you have to download a plugin in order
to start reading its documentation, isn't it?

Of course each author should be able to assign tags to his/her plugin
and create cross references to other plugins such as

my plugin "xptemplate" -is-related-to snipmate
my plugin "xptemplate" -is-related-to ultisnips

my plugin "xptemplate" supersedes XY because FOO

In the end that's almost all users care about.

We could move all existing plugins on www.vim.org (which don't have any
maintainers) to a github account - the way vim-scripts has done it.

Does this make sense to you?
Do you see any major problems which such an "open" design?

I'm not going to replace www.vim.org in the near future.
However may be willing to setup an alternative site which could be good
enough to replace www.vim.org one day if Bram agrees, funding and
support of the page suffices and the charity aspect of Vim is honored etc.

And to make this a success I'd like to allow everyone to participate.

Marc Weber

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