Plugin manager ends up with spurious results

OK, here’s the deal: I’m experimenting with some native code. There is an operation that is done more efficiently in native code. What it is is not relevant. I have done several things to verify that the idea works, that is fine.

However: today I made some update to my system. Thus current configuration is:

OS: Win7 Pro 64-bit

Cordova: 7.1.0
IONIC CLI: 3.15.2
plugman: 1.4.1 (rolled back because version 1.5.1 does not work at all)
node: 6.9.4
npm: 5.5.1

The build targets currently Android, later iOS as well.

So I created a simple native plugin and as usual I executed

plugman createpackagejson . (in the directory containing the plugin.xml and source)

The above is fine. The next thing (in the project root)

cordova plugin add plugins/the-echo-plugin

causes something I haven’t seen before: the plugin directory contents are simply deleted. There is one logical outcome though: plugman complains about missing plugin.xml. Well, obviously…

The question: why?

I mean I have done this several times before and now just “I will delete this directory’s contents and then complain that there is something missing” -behavior. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Plugman is a Cordova tool. You should probably as at the Cordova Slack or via an issue at issues.cordova.io.