File providers were an interesting concept that never quite found a use case. The original intent was to allow specifying paths that could be anywhere - file system, in a zip file, on GitHub, etc. A file provider would abstract that access behind a common API.
In retrospect, modules can do that job better for non-file content. And trying to treat an online resource as if it were a local file doesn’t work great anyway.
The concept of file providers will be (mostly) removed. Instead, a single file provider can still be specified with the virtual file system to allow swapping out real files for test files. The path classes like NormalizedPath will remove all notion of file provider.
File providers were an interesting concept that never quite found a use case. The original intent was to allow specifying paths that could be anywhere - file system, in a zip file, on GitHub, etc. A file provider would abstract that access behind a common API.
In retrospect, modules can do that job better for non-file content. And trying to treat an online resource as if it were a local file doesn’t work great anyway.
The concept of file providers will be (mostly) removed. Instead, a single file provider can still be specified with the virtual file system to allow swapping out real files for test files. The path classes like
NormalizedPathwill remove all notion of file provider.