Glaive feature to trigger plugin activation

[dbarnett]

It's a common pattern to install a plugin, configure it, install another plugin, configure it, etc. It would be nice to be able to consolidate this down to a single line by configuring :Glaive to hook into your plugin manager somehow so it knows how to trigger plugin activation.

The vim-pi project (vim plugin index, a spinoff of the vim-addon-manager project) maps canonical plugin names to an installation source. This means we can both install and configure the plugin using the same short canonical name. For VAM, it's as simple as telling :Glaive NAME to execute :ActivateAddons NAME if the plugin isn't yet activated. For other plugin managers, it might be more complicated, but should still be possible.

[chiphogg]

One caveat: if you're using the new Vundle interface, no autoload functions are available until after vundle#end() is called. I assume commands would be unavailable too.

[dbarnett]

That's weird… So they don't add them to rtp until you call vundle#end()? Do you have a link for details?

That's not necessarily a big deal for this FR, since it's the same basic issue whether you activate plugins explicitly or via a custom Glaive hook, but I think that behavior might break instant/ files on you if they trigger before vundle#end(). It would be good to know what works for Vundle and document it.

[chiphogg]

I think this was added in VundleVim/Vundle.vim@c20c90d86761c8e.