Hey all,
As has been very thoroughly discussed at this point, the cordova-android 5.0.0
update included breaking changes for plugins in response to the new permission
model that Android Marshmallow introduced. Unfortunately, this means that our
plugins that took advantage of the new permission APIs are no longer able to
build on Cordova platforms before cordova-android 5.0.0. Really, this update
only came down to two new methods in CordovaInterface: one for requesting
permissions and one for checking them. Since this is such a minor API change,
it is trivial for us to modify the core plugins that require permissions to use
reflection and allow projects that are still using the earlier Android APIs to
keep using them. I have done so for the camera plugin as an example [1]. All it
took was writing a helper class for permissions that I made general enough to
be easily included in the other core plugins.
This change gives users who are not ready to embrace Android API 23 some more
time before they are forced to update (e.g. if they are still using some other
plugins that have yet to be updated). It also helps us reduce some of the
current plugin versioning woes we're having. Anyone using Cordova 5.x stands to
benefit, since this can prevent some confusion and frustration caused by broken
builds when their cli fetches the latest plugins. In my opinion, the cost of
copying a helper class is worth that potential payoff. What do others think?
I did a little testing with my modified camera plugin and cordova-android 3.7.1
(which I arbitrarily chose) and it built/seemed to work fine. If people support
this idea, I can do a bit more testing and make PRs for the other plugins.
For the record, the affected plugins are as follows:
cordova-plugin-camera
cordova-plugin-contacts
cordova-plugin-file
cordova-plugin-geolocation
cordova-plugin-media
Thanks,
Richard
[1]
https://github.com/apache/cordova-plugin-camera/compare/master...riknoll:reflection?expand=1
