addon-info.json (official minimal documentation)

VAM introduced addon-info.json to document important properties of Vim plugins such as:

• author
• upstream
• dependencies
• additional custom meta data (be open to everyone)

JSON format has been chosen because

• Vim can read it (almost [1]) natively by using eval (even though its evil, butyou trust a plugin anyway)
• its likely that other tools can read JSON, too
• its very simple for humans to edit, too
• its widely known (due to popularity by JavaScript)

most important keys

runtimepath:

Some repositories have a "vim/" subdirectory which needs to be used intsead of root. This key indicates this. Examples are sparkup,merlin,vimwiki,vimbufsync.

depedencies: (VAM only?) See example below

VAM's usage

  {
    'depedencies': {
    'name': { opts-as-in-addon-info.json }
    }
  }

opts are usually empty, but you could use the "url" key to tell VAM where to download the dependency. Usually the download location is derived from vim-pi pool.

VAM's documentation lists more keys, which can be used, but they don't have very important meaning. We could think about supporting keys

• forcing versions (eg git hash of a dependency)
• version constraints (like cabal which is the haskell package manager)
• ...

All keys are described in VAM's documentation

future

Some proposals exist to declare versioned dependendencies, reciepes about how to unpack sources etc

ideas:

vim-pi issue

initial thoughts by Marc Weber and Garbas, titanpad

historical notes

VAM still contains some legacy code to support the older .json file names which contained the plugin name.

notes about this page:

keep the introduction short. Add detailed information into additional sections later on this page