Thanks for your reply.

On Fri, 30 Apr 2021, Efraim Flashner wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 01:03:23AM -0400, Jack Hill wrote:
>> Greetings Guix,
>>
>> I'd like to improve the experience of installing Neovim plugins/add-ons with
>> Guix. I've submitted #48112 [0] which adds an XDG_DATA_DIRS search path so
>> nvim (the Neovim executable name) will be able to find plugins installed by
>> guix at …/share/nvim/site.
>
> I guess my first question is does it work? I think I first tried
> something similar for vim with 'share/vim/vimfiles' but it didn't
> actually work for vim.

Yes, it does work! I tested it with neovim-syntastic and a local 
neovim-fugitive package both with a guix environment and manually 
manipulated environment variables.

A difference between Neovim and Vim is that Neovim supports XDG_DATA_DIRS 
(and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS) as real search paths while the environment variables 
for Vim are single directories (compare `:help runtimepath` in the two 
editors).

>> Currently, we only have one such package, neovim-syntastic. I'd like to add
>> more. Many plugins are compatible with both vim and nvim. However, they
>> search for plugins at different paths. Therefore, the vim-syntastic and
>> neovim-syntastic packages, which use the copy-build-system, differ only in
>> the destination directories of the install-plan (and changing "Vim" to
>> "Neovim" in the description).
>>
>> My initial inclination is to remove the duplication of maintaining two
>> install-plans (and other arguments) by creating a procedure that would take
>> as input a Vim package that uses copy-build-system and output a Neovim
>> package with the install-plan re-written.
>>
>> Perhaps that solution would be overwrought. How would you recommend handling
>> this situation?
>
> My first idea would be to have the one package install the files into
> both directories and combine them, but I feel like it falls apart when
> it comes to searching for vim/neovim plugins and naming. One package
> with two names? Call it vim-neovim-syntastic?
>
> If vim/neovim move more apart and actually need separate plugins in the
> future then I guess it would make more sense to have two actual packages
> that can be installed by name (vim-foo and neovim-foo).

A combined package is an interesting suggestion. However, I share the 
concern about searching for packages. Having packages that are compatible 
with both editors use one naming scheme and ones that are compatible with 
only one use a different naming scheme seems like a implementation detail 
that would be better not to expose to me.

I drew inspiration for creating the Neovim package variants with a 
procedure from the package-for-python2 and sbcl-package->ecl-package. Of 
course those procedures have build system support and aren't depending on 
a common usage pattern of copy-build-system.

Is it time a a vim-build-system? Perhaps not, but I'm still not sure what 
the right way forward is.

Best,
Jack