I have seen this topic before but the posts were not suggesting anything except 'look at the download manager'/
i have done that and the 'issue' is that all the methods return a Download object that is filled from a DBDownload object that itself gets loaded from the db by ID, the only link between the productvariant and the download data.
now i could modify the whole thing to just store the download id in the db and map it to a physical file ...
this involves changing the structure of the db and a couple of classes and many methods across the application. this might cause incompatibilities with the next releases. with all the changes , it'll be impossible to upgrade and keep the customizations in.
i would think it would be better to have detailed suggestions from the creators on how to do this so it can match with the next release...
this issue is a real problem to many users as almost all downloadable products are large...
please take this in consideration and suggest a change to be used by everybody till this functionality is released.
thank you.