Submodules
guest@6admin.io:~$ ls ~/tags/submodules
vim-plugin-manager: turning a decade of bash into a real Vim plugin
Seven years after the hand-rolled submodule script, the rewrite in VimScript: declarative PluginBegin blocks, parallel background installs, pinning re-asserted from the vimrc and lazy loading that deletes its own placeholders. Episode three of the vim series.
Git submodules by hand: my Vim 8 plugins without a manager
When Debian and Ubuntu shipped Vim 8 and its native packages, I moved my plugin jungle into git submodules plus a 100-line bash script called plugins. The era of manual init/update, auto-commits and the necessary devil.