ma The idea is that instead of having to go to github (or wherever the ANE is) download the ane, then download any dependencies, read the documentation for the application descriptor updates, identify conflicts etc you would just have to do:
I have some ideas around dependencies, AndroidManifest and how these references could be packaged inside the ANE.
You would also want the tool to have the ability to reference a url (like npm can) and not be too centralised whereby to do a release you need to do PRs for json files on a repo you have no publish rights for example.
The tool could then download the main ANE, query it to list child dependencies, manifest-merge to merge all the AndroidManifest.xml.
I have done some ground work on doing this with my android-dependency generator program (eg Firebase has a right myriad of manifest additions).
https://github.com/tuarua/Android-ANE-Dependencies/blob/development/AndroidDependencyBuilder/Package.cs#L336
I will write a more detailed post when I get time in the coming days.
Edit: I imagine Java (or other JVM based lang like Kotlin) makes sense for the tooling as that is what adt is written in and may be able to interoperate more easily with other Android tooling.
Could of course use lots of other langs-du-jour like .NET core, etc etc