feature: provide a convenient way to apply patches to plugins

[Bekaboo]

Did you check the docs?

• I have read all the lazy.nvim docs

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Hi folke, thanks for your work on this plugin!

I'm aware of the existence of dev and dir=... options that can be used to manage local plugins, but in sometimes I just want to apply a few small changes to the plugin before my changes get merged to the upstream, where I prefer to use git patches to change the plugins locally without having to change the repo url in the plugins specs.

Currently I use the build option to do this:

{
  'foo/bar',
  build = 'git apply '
    .. vim.fn.stdpath('config')
    .. '/patches/bar.patch',
}

but when I upgrade the plugin, because of the existence of the local changes, git checkout will fail.

I wonder if lazy.nvim can provide an option in the plugin spec called patch that accepts a string as the path to the patch.

If patch is specified, lazy.nvim should

• apply the patch before running build
• on updating, revert the patch first, then update and plugin and tries to reapply the patch
  • lazy.nvim should throw error if the patch cannot be applies to the new version of the plugin, else update the plugin normally

Describe the solution you'd like

lazy.nvim can provide an option in the plugin spec called patch that accepts a string (as the path to the patch) or a function (that can be used to apply the patch).

If patch is specified, lazy.nvim should

• apply the patch before running build
• on updating, revert the patch first, then update and plugin and tries to reapply the patch
  • lazy.nvim should throw error if the patch cannot be applies to the new version of the plugin, else update the plugin normally

Describe alternatives you've considered

N/A

Additional context

No response

[folke]

I'm not interested as having this in lazy

[Bekaboo]

@folke Thanks for your reply.

Can we instead add some new user events such as LazySyncPre or LazyUpdatePre besides LazySync, LazyUpdate, etc so that users can take advantage of these events to achieve what is described above?

[folke]

Just added this