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From: Andrew Grieve <agrieve@chromium.org>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 11:25:05 -0400
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Subject: Consolidating the Distribution of Platforms & Plugins
To: dev <dev@cordova.apache.org>
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Right now, CLI downloads & caches platforms & plugins using two different
mechanisms, with totally independent code paths.

plugman uses the request library, with proxy settings in .plugman/config.
It downloads the tars directly from registry.cordova.io. It does not cache
them.

CLI uses the request library as well, with proxy settings from .npmrc. It
downloads tars directly from our git server's archive endpoint. It caches
them in ~/.cordova.


I'd like to propose that we unify them. Specifically:

1. Store platforms on registry.cordova.io
  - This would allow CLI to easily see what versions of platforms are
available, and be able to choose between them.
  - This (I'm sure), INFRA would be much happier about than our current
fetch-from-git approach

2. Unify CLI & Plugman's downloading logic
  - Use the same code-path for both.
  - Have them use the same caching logic.

3. Use npm's cache logic instead of our own:
  - Just type npm help cache to see what it does
  - Would allow for: "cordova cache clean"

I would *not* want to lose our support for --searchpath, as I think it's
really handy. I don't see a problem with this though.

This would also enable CLI to answer queries like "what platform versions
are available", and make it trivial to do "install cordova-android@3.0.0"

This isn't something I have time to work on in the near future, but wanted
to see if everyone would be onboard with the change. I'll end up just
filing bugs for the changes if it sounds good... but if anyone else wants
to work on it... :)

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