Chicken or Egg dilemma is known from the ancient days.
In case of Vundle the dilemma manifests itself as a bunch of errors during bundles installation in certain conditions.
Problem
It’s pretty common to have settings that are plugin dependant. For instance, lets have statusline to display current git branch, ie:
set statusline=+'%<\ %f\ %{fugitive#statusline()}'
which requires fugitive bundle auto-loadable when status line is displayed.
Having such dependency means that each time Vim runs without fugitive - causes errors!
And it happens at least once - the very first time you try to install plugins.
This isn’t good.
Solution
The first thing that comes up on mind is to conditionally require dependants. But that’s not a clean solution as it involves bunch of ifs, which is a code smell in this case.
Instead, it’s recommended to split .vimrc and have [Vundle] configuration in separate file, ie:
" .vimrc
" Vundle and bundles configuration
source bundles.vim
" my configuration which depends on bundles
set statusline=+'%<\ %f\ %{fugitive#statusline()}'
and bundles.vim:
set nocompatible " be iMproved
filetype off " required!
set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/vundle/
call vundle#rc()
Bundle 'gmarik/vundle'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
" ...rest of bundles
filetype plugin indent on " required!
That doesn’t solve our problem yet though.
What makes all the difference is the way you install bundles for the first time, like this:
$ vim -u bundles.vim +BundleInstall +qall
makes Vim use bundles.vim as its configuration file, run BundleInstall and quit afterwards.
Having plugins installed makes Vim run smoothly without any errors.
Nice!