Github user filmaj commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-file-transfer/pull/150
Alright, I took a look at this again after an extended break and I have
more comments, and want to bring more information to the community about the
future of this plugin as well.
First, and I think most important, we need to be clear about the future of
this plugin. A couple of months back, Cordova developers did an [audit of the
core cordova plugins](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-12708), and one
result was the decision to [sunset the File Transfer
plugin](https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-12711) in [favour of the
increasingly-available XHR2 APIs](http://caniuse.com/#feat=xhr2). The XHR2 (now
simply merged into the core XHR spec) features that are relevant to File
Transfer plugin users are the ability to upload and to receive progress events
- giving us exact feature parity for what File Transfer provides to users
today. The benefit to sunsetting this plugin is that there would be less stuff
to maintain for Cordova as XHR2 is already widely available on most mobile
platform. With that in mind, that makes me reluctant to make many changes to
this plugin as it's essentially makework.
Second, looking at the specific code changes in here, I started wondering,
why execute the permission requesting inside this plugin? This plugin already
depends on the core cordova File plugin, which does have support for
Marshmallow permission model - why duplicate that? Turns out it is because the
read/write methods of File Transfer, on the native Android side, are completely
recreated/reproduced! I think a "proper" change to FT to support this would be
to leverage [cordova-plugin-file's `FileUtils` class and call its `execute`
method, passing in the right arguments to trigger the `write`
action](https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-file/blob/master/src/android/FileUtils.java#L351-L369).
Similarly, for reading files, the same could be done, using one of the
[plethora of `readAs*` methods available in cordova-plugin-file's
`FileUtils.java`
class](https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-file/blob/master/src/android/FileUtils.java#L310-L349).
The benefits I see to using this
approach:
1. no need to rewrite permission handling code - cordova-plugin-file's
native Android code already does that.
2. we could completely remove all file-reading and file-writing native
Android code inside cordova-plugin-file-transfer, as we'd defer all of that
work to the File plugin.
All that being said, once Cordova sunsets this plugin, the plugin code will
be open and available to the community. The community could manage this code as
it is however it seems right to them. While the patch here is not "perfect", it
works, and that is more valuable to a lot of people.
So, I think I won't take any action on this PR. I am sorry that my previous
review and comments in here made it seem like this PR would make its way into
the mainline. Things have changed, and this plugin's window of life is closing.
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