Pull Google Play Services from android-sdk

[rlepinski]

Instead of packaging and distributing Google Play Services, you could pull them from the android-sdk directory. This has the advantage of not needing to update the module whenever a new version of GPS is released and it prevents you from distributing GPS (against the license).

Here is an example: https://github.com/urbanairship/phonegap-ua-push/tree/master/src/android/google-play-services

[agrieve]

To add to this:

• Believe there is support in plugman for referencing SDK-relative libs. Could use that feature, but I suspect that would make for errors for users that installed it via SDK Manager.
• Looks like Play Services has now been split into more finer-grained libraries: https://developer.android.com/google/play-services/setup.html#Setup
• The gradle way of including play services is what we should switch to as soon as gradle is the default build system and I think then this plugin can just go away (or be replaced by a one-liner)

We should just move to using these at some point in the future and deprecate this plugin.

[rlepinski]

• The plugman bit would be great if it worked, last time i checked it didn't. Maybe I did something wrong.
• Google is still offering the library project with all the API's for GPS and I imagine they will continue to do so for eclipse users.
• Yes, hopefully we will see more support now that the Android gradle plugin 1.0.0 is out.

The way I suggested would just be a stopgap solution for the licensing issue and keeping GPS up to date until we see full gradle support.

[pkaul]

Have a look at https://github.com/pkaul/googleplayservices-cordova-plugin. Altough not perfect yet (fails for newest Android SDK, requires installation of ANT, ...) it provides a first working sketch of the suggested solution.

[rlepinski]

The ant version that I linked to works as well. I am currently using in phonegap-ua-push. It uses the standard ant build system.