feature: detection of plugin with build steps

[tjdevries]

Did you check the docs?

• I have read all the lazy.nvim docs

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

Various plugins have external tooling / requirements that must be either installed or built:

For example:

• telescope-fzf-native must compile some C files into a shared library.
• There are also various other plugins that build shared libraries in other compiled languages (rust, for example).
• Remote plugins would benefit from a way to install their dependencies without the user having to care what language the plugin is interested in ("do i need npm or yarn? does XYZ work")

Describe the solution you'd like

My proposal is not that we create a package management system, but instead a standard location for some lua file (perhaps build.lua or build/init.lua at the root of the plugin for example) that can be executed and is expected to handle any environment/tooling setup. This will still be on the plugin authors to still do an actually good job of making this happen. But the file would be executed via nvim -l build.lua so that it doesn't require make / bash / etc that makes it difficult to support build steps on windows. This also provides a more standardized and isolated env to run the steps).

The reason I like having a particular file for this is because lazy can make optimizations (not running this on every startup but only when updating or installing a package). It's not always trivial to ensure that everything is built/up-to-date (npm run build is non-trivial blocking time, even with nothing extra to do).

If this catches on, I think a build/ directory could eventually land in core as an interface (perhaps with no additional functionality baked into core).

I don't want nvim to have to worry at all about the actual installing, it's just a standard entry point so that users aren't forced to copy & paste in a script for installation, but instead it can be discovered (and updated by authors, which means less annoying/silent breaking changes -- I can expand on real world cases of this if people are interest [a very simple one is pure lua plugin wants to add some shared library / dep... how to notify users that they have to change the installation configuration they had before?])

Describe alternatives you've considered

Not doing this and just keeping things the way they are :) which is also good

Additional context

This is not a 100% well thought idea, but just something I thought might be interesting to discuss here, and if it catches on, could be upstreamed in some way that makes this easier/standard for all package managers.

[folke]

Good idea! See the linked PR :)