Should Neovim support transitive plugin dependencies?
Neovim 0.12 ships with a plugin manager vim.pack, which automatically installs plugins. But plugins don’t yet have a way to declare dependencies. Some sort of package “spec” is needed for that. And we’re considering it.I was excited to solve the “deps” problem with a simple spec: essentially, “a list of URLs which may each have its own list… of… URLs”.Great, we did it!But wait. Vim and Neovim plugins have been cursed/blessed with an accidental constraint for 20+ years: they must be self-contained (where “must” means “incessantly encouraged”).“Self-contained” begets duplication of “libraries”, and potentially missing bugfixes or upgrades. So to encourage high-quality libraries, we want plugins to have dependencies.Yet also,…
