List required dependencies in README or bin/help.deps

[jthegedus]

asdf plugins should clearly list their dependencies required for the plugin to operate as expected. The core repo has had issues opened on this matter, most recently asdf-vm/asdf#1176 Because of this, the plugin template has a section in the README specifically to encourage listing of dependencies. The core also added the call-back script bin/help.deps:

bin/help.deps - This script should output the list of dependencies tailored to the operating system. One dependency per line.

It would be great if the asdf-vm/asdf-* plugins utilised these conventions to improve the UX of newcomers.

To illustrate how this can be an issue, the asdf docs getting-started guide has a section about installing a plugin and it's dependencies. asdf-nodejs is used as the example with the dependencies listed, however I believe these deps are no longer correct given how the asdf-nodejs plugin has grown and changed since those docs were written.

Further UX improvements can be implemented by plugin authors through use of bin/post-plugin-add script by checking to see if the listed dependencies are available on the system and alerting the user. See my plugin(s) as examples - https://github.com/jthegedus/asdf-v/blob/main/bin/post-plugin-add

[augustobmoura]

asdf-nodejs doesn't have any other required dependencies aside from the ones already required by asdf-core (git and curl), you think we still need to list those?

we do have some additional dependencies if building from source is needed, but those are a moving target as each version has its own set of build dependencies

[jthegedus]

Right, well if the list https://asdf-vm.com/guide/getting-started.html#plugin-dependencies is no longer required we should probably remove them now. You could still use help.deps to codify and communicate the build deps for those moving target versions, but that's up to you.