[mini.deps] for Debian Trixie

[shuber2]

The recent MiniMax blog article on neovim-0.12 support says

The ‘mini.deps’ module is planned to be retired (i.e. will be present but without updates) soon-ish after Neovim=0.12 is released.

I use Debian on many of my working machines, with neovim-0.10.4 being the latest version for Debian Trixie as stable release. Debian Forky (testing) is currently at 0.11.6 and – a wild guess – might ship 0.12+ when it will be released at approximately summer 2027, i.e., in some 1.5 years.

Until then, would it be possible to maintain mini.deps at least to some form for the next some 1.5 years, or is this rather not going to happen? What do you think on this?

[echasnovski]

Until then, would it be possible to maintain mini.deps at least to some form for the next some 1.5 years, or is this rather not going to happen? What do you think on this?

The plan is for 'mini.deps' to just remain "frozen" at least until the support for Neovim=0.11 is dropped for 'mini.nvim'. That is soon-ish after Neovim=0.14 release which is most certainly not going to be released soon.

But even at least after that 'mini.deps' may just as well be present for some time, depending on availability of Neovim>=0.12 for major distributions (which Debian stable is the first to check :) ).

This approach makes 'mini.deps' work on Neovim<0.12 for all the time it is a part of 'mini.nvim'. For Neovim>=0.12 it is planned to suggest using vim.pack indeed. So I don't think there should be an issue here.

[shuber2]

Best case scenario. Excellent. Thank you for your great work.

[okraits]

I would suggest to use the AppImage provided by the neovim project. That way you can use the latest version of neovim on Debian stable.

[echasnovski]

Also, one thing to add. Since this mentioned MiniMax, the goal of its setting up steps is to have a working config for any supported Neovim version indefinitely. So in theory even in case 'mini.deps' is removed from 'mini.nvim', setting up MiniMax with Neovim=0.10 would still work. Yes, it will check out not the latest available versions and without custom tweaks, but still.

[shuber2]

That is a strong statement – very computer science-like.