Now that we've extracted even more pieces of core functionality into plugins, it'd be good to ease the pain a little on the existing config.plugins way of specifying the load order. I propose introducing the :all term, which would work like this:
config.plugins = [ :acts_as_list, :classic_pagination, :all ]
That way you don't have to name all your plugins to specify that a very select few needs to be loaded in a particular order. :all will expand to mean all the other plugins not already mentioned in alphabetical order.
See http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core/browse_frm/thread/7615e2ac0fa019d for more context. I don't buy into plugins being able to manage these things themselves. There should be some vinegar on plugin dependencies, so we don't encourage heavy and deep dependencies. But this would make it just the right amount, I think. Plugins can use their install.rb and README files to tell the user what the dependencies are and how to install and specify them.
