Deprecate BuildHelper & PermissionHelper to be removed someday in the future?

[brody4hire]

From https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CB-12730 it looks like these classes were added to support cordova-plugin-compat, which is now a deprecated plugin.

My impression is that the functionality in BuildHelper & PermissionHelper classes could have been implemented in the plugins instead.

[dpogue]

ping @macdonst because I think he was involved in the discussions around the cordova-plugin-compat and PermissionHelper stuff.

I seem to recall that they were necessary to support older Android versions where those APIs didn't exist

[brody4hire]

Thanks @dpogue. I spotted a couple things in PermissionHelper.java:

From the class description:

* This class provides reflective methods for permission requesting and checking so that plugins
* written for cordova-android 5.0.0+ can still compile with earlier cordova-android versions.

I think there should be no more need for plugins to support running on cordova-android pre-5.0.0.

The class also has a private static deliverPermissionResult that is not called anywhere.

BuildHelper.java seems to just get a field from a BuildConfig class:

https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/blob/8a4ae311ce165e31f0511ae43274aa52d3773fd2/framework/src/org/apache/cordova/BuildHelper.java#L54-L56

and check for exceptions, which is all very basic Java programming.

I would really favor marking these classes as deprecated classes, to be removed from a major release someday in the future, with plenty of advance warning.

I am looking forward to the response from @macdonst.