Cordova is a framework/runtime environment created by Adobe to allow mobile phone apps written in HTML/js to run equally across different mobile platforms. It is a highly strategical package for the Ubuntu Touch project, as it grants us access to a large collection of apps that we would otherwise lack, during the early stages of Ubuntu Touch adoption (eg, the goal of course is to have lots of nice native apps, but until we get a large selection of those, we rely on cordova apps to fill in missing functionality).
It was ready to land a couple weeks ago, but due to the feature-freeze rush it was difficult to get the packaging reviewed & approved by an archive admin in time, so here we are a day after feature freeze asking for an exception.
The two source packages can be found at lp:cordova-ubuntu and lp:cordova-ubuntu-tests (which contains both unit and integration tests, necessary for daily-releasing the cordova framework).
For reference, here is the MIR bug: https:/