Third-party Package Manager Support For Plugins

Status: Proposed

Corresponding mailing list discussion is here.

JIRA issue tracking this is here

This is not a platform specific issue, at least for cordova-ios, and is the domain of the cordova-lib/cli currently. The cordova-lib re-factor might change this however.

Proposed support is through the existing <engine> and <framework> tags.

Example usage

<engines>
    <engine name="cocoapods" version=">=0.39.0"  platform="ios" />
    <engine name="nuget" version=">=3.2" platform="windows" />
</engines>

<framework src="name_of_cocoapod" type="podspec" spec="~> 1.1.2"/>
<framework src="path/to/mynu.nuspec" type="nuspec" />

The above use existing documented attributes for both the <engine> and <framework> tags.

Engine tag

The name attribute would specify the command-line package manager to be used, for example “cocoapods” or “nuget”. The version attribute should correspond to the version of the package manager supported -- the package manager itself should support sending its version to stdout. In this case, the platform attribute supported is implicit (since cocoapods is only supported in OS X and nuget in Windows), so the attribute is superfluous.

Framework Tag

The src attribute can be a relative path or a URL. The type attribute specifies the type of framework that corresponds to the engine supported. In this case type podspec means that the lib should be installed using the cocoapods package manager, and nuspec for the nuget package manager.

Spec Argument

The spec arugment will specify the version of the CocoaPod that is to be used. ~> is CocoaPod's optimistic operator-- copied from CocoaPods docs:

‘~> 0.1.2’ Version 0.1.2 and the versions up to 0.2, not including 0.2 and higher
‘~> 0.1’ Version 0.1 and the versions up to 1.0, not including 1.0 and higher Cocoapods also support logical operators:
‘> 0.1’ Any version higher than 0.1
‘>= 0.1’ Version 0.1 and any higher version

The string passed in the spec argument will be pasted into the Podfile.