Language server version pinning

[stanekondrej]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Fedora bundles Zig 14, but ZLS installed with Mason only supports Zig 15. I believe it would be beneficial for many people, as language servers not only add new features, but sometimes accidentally break some, and if a person wants stability, then pinning known-good versions would be the way to go, I think.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a config field for a language server version, something like what Lazy.nvim does - see the version field.

Describe potential alternatives you've considered

I guess a person could definitely install language servers by hand, but that would defeat the purpose of Mason (and by extension any package manager).

Additional context

No response

[sbeyer]

To make things more complicated, the pinning could also be dependent on the project. For example for C/C++ projects, clang-tidy is used in some CIs, but the configuration format breaks now and then, the defaults change a lot, major updates appear frequently. So in some project we might want to use clangd 21, in others clangd 19, in others clangd 14. While writing this, I just found out I can do :MasonInstall clangd@14.0.0, :MasonInstall clangd@21.1.8 etc (and you can do similar for the zig LSP). It's a bit cumbersome to do that when changing projects, but ...maybe this is already a good enough solution?

[stanekondrej]

@sbeyer That's interesting, I never noticed that; thank you. However, it does seem pretty cumbersome to me to use this while switching between multiple projects. But perhaps per-project configuration is better delegated to some other plugin that already serves that purpose, like windwp/nvim-projectconfig or maybe even the old exrc?

[bugsbugsbux]

an explicit version= field would be nice for pinning but for setup replication we also need a lockfile like vim.pack see #663