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

On 3/23/14, 11:34 AM, 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.

I use Pathogen for the following reasons:
- Allows to have every plugin segregated in its own directory.
- It's posible to have more than one "bundle" dir. At least in my clone.
- Leaves the plugin management up to the user. It doesn't
install/remove/update plugins.
- Individual plugins can be temporarily disabled by filtering them out
of the runtimepath at start up.
- The configuration is dead simple.

> Is there one that works best, that everybody should use?

Since we don't have a canonical source for plugins, I doubt that any
plugin manager will be able to handle the current and future multitude
of sources and formats on which plugins are and will be available.

> Are there still features that no existing plugin manager offers?

I can think of only one "feature" that could make a plugin manager a
viable tool: to be a built-in feature of Vim (I'd prefer a solution in
VimL, but one in C would make me happy too) and use vim.org as the only
source for plugins.

> Vundle appears to be popular, someone mentioned it's better than
> Pathogen. So nobody is using Pathogen?

Without being a plugin manager Pathogen is still a popular choice and,
given its simplicity, I doubt that that will change any time soon.

> 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 think it's good to have choices, but I also think that having a
built-in plugin manager that uses a single source would be even better.
It would allow to concentrate the work on a single project, a simplest
project since it wouldn't have to handle multiple sources and formats.
It could even provide a base for external plugins to provide additional
features, as is to be expected of every aspect of vim.

Cheers!
Israel

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