What's the difference between "wants" & "requires"?

[Jarmos-san]

I stumble across quite a lot of dotfiles which uses the wants keyword over require when adding a dependency for a plugin. Following is an example:

-- truncated code

    use {
        'feline-nvim/feline.nvim',
        event = { 'VimEnter' },
        config = function()
            require 'conf.feline'
        end,
        -- Adding a dependency here with the "wants" keyword
        wants = { 'nvim-web-devicons' },
    }

    use {
        'lewis6991/gitsigns.nvim',
        event = { 'BufWinEnter', 'BufNewFile' },
        config = function()
            require('conf.gitsigns').config()
        end,
        -- Adding a dependency here with the "requires" keyword
        requires = { 'plenary.nvim' },
    }

-- truncated code

I couldn't find any mention of the wants keywords anywhere in the documentations (or perhaps I missing out on something). So, I was wondering how does either wants or requires affect packer's behaviour?

[nyngwang]

@Jarmos-san Did you find the answer?

[Jarmos-san]

None yet, else I would've shared an answer here for sure! I was hoping someone else more aware of the source code would be willing to share some insights though.

[nyngwang]

@Jarmos-san Here is a comment where someone provides all things necessary to understand wants. I also left a summary there based on what I have read from the commit message of that PR adding wants as a key.

In short: we need to avoid the usage of wants since it's just a hotfix(and some people have reported that its behavior was incorrect in some edge cases), it will probably get deprecated/merged into after or something (or we even don't need to worry about the ordering after v2.)

[Jarmos-san]

Got it! Can you share an answer here so that I can add it as the accepted answer?