Re: Is Vundle dead?

Currently there are 3 widely used plugin management implementations:

pathogon
vim-addon-manager
vundle

They all get the basic things done, so they all are helpful. They all
can checkout git repos (which most packages today use anyway) - so they
can't really be out of date. If they work for you, use them and be
happy.

vim-addon-manager differs in some aspects (by design)
- 2 maintainers, thus bugs and requests usually get fixed within less
than 48 hours. Probably it doesn't matter, cause vundle and pathogen
are very stable, doing what they were written for.
- you can activate plugins at runtime very often. VAM sources
plugin/*.vim files for you.
- it supports dependencies (selecting plugins by name).
It does so by reading an addon-info.json file
- it suppotrs a pool of known good plugin which also allows to deprecate
superseded plugins - you can still install them, but you'll get a
warning. Eg have a look at http://vam.mawercer.de/ to get an idea
about how names are mapped to sources.
- it can install svn,hg,darcs,... sources as well as get zip files
from www.vim.org. We wrote as script dumping the important parts of
the database.
- usually a name is associated with a plugin automatically, however
you can still choose to install plugins in a vundle/pathogen like
style by using 'github:name/repo' name rewriting
- there is experimental support to lazily load plugins whenever you
edit a specific filetype.

However depending on git only (like pathogen and vundle) also has some
advantages: You can use git submodule to version your .vim state etc.
VAM does not support that. Plugins seldomly broke for me which is why
I didn't see a requirement to think about a realy fix. I still see this
as kind of flaw.

However VAM was written to make everything jsut work, thus it can also
cope with plugins having files in the wrong directories. Thus it moves
top-level foo.vim files into the appropriate plugin/syntax/indent
directories if the plugin type on www.vim.org is not set correctlly.
And it adds dependencies information for plugins which don't support the
addon-info.json themselves yet. Eg have a look at:
https://github.com/MarcWeber/vim-addon-manager-known-repositories/blob/master/db/patchinfo.vim
to get an idea. There are so many plugins out there, and sometimes its
hard to find the best one. By asking the community to help masking
outdated packages the goal of vim-addon-manager is to improve overall
experience and to get it right for the most common average "just let me
use try and finish" use case.

In the very long run (if I had more time to work on it) - I'd like to
separate the dependency and patch stuff and put it on www.vim.org so
that all plugin management solutions can read it. VAM still is a 20% of
effort yields 80% of value project.

I talked about it that much now - even though this might be considered
off-topic - is because it was not mentioned - and I think that Vim users
should know that it exists as alternative.

vim-scripts.org was broken for 2-3 month in the past - but fixed again.
We all have day jobs - almost none of us gets payed for this - so
unfortunately it may happen that things are broken for a couple of weeks
in rare cases.

Yours
Marc Weber

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