Just to clarify this in my head: * Since we have a prepare step now, you propose moving some of the logic that used to run on plugin add out into the prepare step. That sounds good. * You want to fix how we track which plugins are installed by going to source instead of some config file. That sounds good. * You want to fix a bunch of stuff with the prepare step (including the current add logic). I can't really comment on specifics here, but I guess this is not as radical of a change as I thought on first pass.
I briefly asked you offline but wanted to bring it into the ML: How does this proposal affect our current plan for plugin upgrading? (Your answer, paraphrasing, was that prepare step should ideally be stateless and start from any clean state. Thus, upgrade is simply an rm & add & prepare) -Michal On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:32 AM, Braden Shepherdson <bra...@chromium.org>wrote: > I'm running into several problems with the current implementation of > cordova-cli: > > * There's no single source of truth for what plugins are installed. It uses > the presence of a plugin's name in the www/config.xml currently. This > doesn't work for JS-only plugins, and there are some, especially on other > platforms. > * It's polluting (maybe clobbering!) the user's www/ during plugin add. > * It expects plugins to have a www/ directory it copies whole into the > top-level www/, rather than honouring <asset> tags as per docs. > > My proposal is to rewire cordova-cli according to two principles: > > 1. We never pollute the user's www/ with anything. Full stop. Everything we > do automagically goes into the platform directories at cordova prepare > time. > 2. We use the existence of absence of directories in plugins/ as the source > of truth for what is or isn't installed. > > Under this model, plugin add/rm become fancy aliases for cp -R and rm -rf. > No magic or copying of JS or native files or config editing or anything > else happens on plugin add: We just copy the directory into plugins/. > > Then on cordova prepare, we copy native files into the platforms, edit > platform-specific config files to include <plugin> tags and permissions and > list the native files. > > iOS makes this hard, since it has a project file that lists all native > files in the project. We can get around this by putting all plugin files > into a subdirectory like src/plugins. Then on cordova prepare we can get > every file in that directory, remove them from the project file, delete > them, then copy every plugin's native files and add them to the project > file. Then the project file always matches the current load of plugins. > > I'm volunteering to do the work required for this. I just want to run the > idea past people before I start fundamentally changing how the tool works. > I think this will make many parts of the code simpler to read and document, > and make the behavior of the tool much clearer and less magical to users. > > Braden >
