Re: Poll: What's good about plugin managers?

On Sunday, March 23, 2014 4:34:19 PM UTC+1, Bram Moolenaar wrote:
> At some point Vim started supporting plugins. At that time it was fine
> to add a plugin manually, it was a one-time thing. But now that there
> are so many plugins and they get updated often, manually updating
> plugins has become tedious.
>
> I am wondering what Vim users like about plugin managers.
> Is there one that works best, that everybody should use?
> Are there still features that no existing plugin manager offers?
>
> Vundle appears to be popular, someone mentioned it's better than
> Pathogen. So nobody is using Pathogen?
>
> But then there is also NeoBundle. But not everybody has git installed
> and it depends on that.
>
> And there also is vim-addon-manager. And Vimball.
>
> Is it fine to have a choice of plugin managers, or is this causing a
> headache (for users and/or for plugin writers). If yes, then we should
> pick one plugin manager and retire the others.

I agree with those saying that a decent canonical plugin source is more
important than a plugin manager. As far as plugin managers are
concerned, I think variety is fine.

Currently, the official 'canonical plugin source' is the scripts site on
vim.org. If you listen to the community, you will hear that some good
people avoid vim.org because it isn't up to standards. And I think
they're right. I am very sympathetic to vim.org being the canonical
source for released Vim plugins -- unlike GitHub et al. it is not
for-profit, and there is no requirement for a particular SCM.

But vim.org needs work.

There is no agreement on scripts packaging, with some people uploading
zips, some Vimballs, and some just a script file.

There is no consistency in versioning.

There is no support for explicit dependencies, so they have to be given
in prose (and installed manually by the user).

There is no support for linking to some repository or issue tracker,
again, it needs to be given in prose.

There is no social interaction, no recommendations, no comments. Because
of this and because some people abuse the system the votes are basically
meaningless.

Finally, and that is the crux, there is no API. In consequence, the
plugin manager communities will have to continue to find other ways of
getting at their data and work around the inconsistencies.

It is not clear to me who is responsible for vim.org/scripts, but there
have been quite a number of relevant messages here, and the response to
them (mostly silence) tells me that these issues are not a priority.
Therefore I think including a plugin manager with Vim will not improve
the situation.


--
David

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