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Miscellaneous auto-load Vim scripts

The git repository at [github.com/xolox/vim-misc] repository contains Vim scripts that are used by most of the [Vim plug-ins I've written] plugins yet don't really belong with any single one. I include this repository as a subdirectory of my plug-in repositories using the following commands:

$ git remote add -f vim-misc https://github.com/xolox/vim-misc.git
$ git merge -s ours --no-commit vim-misc/master
$ git read-tree --prefix=autoload/xolox/misc/ -u vim-misc/master
$ git commit -m "Merge vim-misc repository as subdirectory"

The above trick is called the [subtree merge strategy] merge-strategy. To update a plug-in repository to the latest version of the miscellaneous auto-load scripts I execute the following command:

$ git pull -s subtree vim-misc master

Why make things so complex?

I came up with this solution after multiple years of back and forth between Vim Online users, the GitHub crowd and my own sanity:

  1. When I started publishing my first Vim plug-ins I would prepare ZIP archives for Vim Online using makefiles. The makefiles would make sure the miscellaneous scripts were included in the uploaded distributions. This had two disadvantages: It lost git history and the repositories on GitHub were not usable out of the box, so [I got complaints from GitHub (Pathogen) users] github-complaints.

  2. My second attempt to solve the problem used git submodules which seemed like the ideal solution until I actually started doing it. Submodules are not initialized during a normal git clone, you need to use git clone --recursive instead but Vim plug-in managers like Pathogen pathogen and Vundle vundle don't do this (at least [they didn't when I tried] vundle-discussion) so people would end up with broken checkouts.

  3. After finding out that git submodules were not going to solve my problems I searched for other inclusion strategies supported by git. After a while I came upon the [subtree merge strategy] merge-strategy which I have been using for more than two years now.

Compatibility issues

Regardless of the inclusion strategies discussed above, my current scheme has a flaw: If more than one of my plug-ins are installed in a Vim profile using Pathogen pathogen or Vundle vundle, the miscellaneous autoload scripts will all be loaded from the subdirectory of one single plug-in.

This means that when I break compatibility in the miscellaneous scripts, I have to make sure to merge the changes into all of my plug-ins. Even then, if a user has more than one of my plug-ins installed but updates only one of them, the other plug-ins (that are not yet up to date) can break (because of the backwards incompatible change).

The xolox#misc#compat#check() function makes sure that incompatibilities are detected early so that the user knows which plug-in to update if incompatibilities arise.

Contact

If you have questions, bug reports, suggestions, etc. the author can be contacted at peter@peterodding.com. The latest version is available at http://peterodding.com/code/vim/misc and http://github.com/xolox/vim-misc.

License

This software is licensed under the [MIT license] mit.
© 2013 Peter Odding <peter@peterodding.com>.