Official plugin manager?

[Sebastian Gniazdowski <sgniazdowski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi
After a brief discussion on IRC, I thought about advantages of an
official p-m being available. Maybe it's the right time to glance over
them?

1. The example, bootstrapping zshrcs shared on the net would be
resulting in feature-complete setups, with e.g.: a feature-rich nice
prompt, syntax-highlighting of the command line and e.g.: of the
history, etc.

2. This could be actually addressing the issue that
zsh-newuser-install aims at solving: to easily bootstrap a new zsh
user's setup.

3. It would offload the situation that "you cannot use Zsh without Oh
My Zsh" or "... without a plugin manager". Today many Zsh users feel
that they "couldn't make it" without Oh My Zsh because Zsh is a
complex system that needs a ground of sane settings. With the official
p-m, the situation would not have been of "laying a ground of sane
settings", but of "loading a well-written prompt", for example, and
it's a different-quality situation.

4. The new users wouldn't have to go through the somewhat stressful
stage of selecting a framework. The stress comes from having a choice,
as there are many p-ms available (antibody, antigen, zgen, zplug,
zplugin to name a few). The users could wait with the need of
switching to a custom p-m for the moment when they will feel that
they're ready to (if they do).

5. Coding such p-m will be a very good time for the people involved
(which I hope would involve Peter, Bart, Oliver, Daniel, Mikael, Roman
and others).

6. It would allow establishing a way of distributing Zsh scripts in a
different way than the autoload functions – by a kind of a package of
files in a subdirectory, The method would have been a step forward and
it would allow contributing such objects to Zsh as currently, it
requires tricks like in the prompt function, which rather closes the
way for such new contributions, as they are not fully nice (the prompt
function is, however, a nice engineering, but that's a special case).

What do you think? Could the official plugin manager project be
starting for 5.9? To then gain a full feature set before 6.0? (I'm
making a slight point here that the p-m would be a good front-end
reason for releasing the next major version).

-- 
Sebastian Gniazdowski
News: https://twitter.com/ZdharmaI
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