Link non-font assets using rnpm - react-native

Question

There are plenty of tutorials on including font assets using rnpm. These are the steps:
Put fonts in, say, ./assets/fonts
Add the following snippet to package.json:
"rnpm": {
"assets": [
"./assets/fonts",
]
}
run react-native link.
Works well for font assets, but what about other types? I need to include a text file, but repeating the above steps for text file assets does not seem to have any effect. What am I missing? There are no mentions on the internet, so I'm not even sure this is possible at all with rnpm.
EDIT: To be more specific, I added a file.txt to the ./assets/raw directory and added ./assets/raw next to ./assets/fonts in the rnpm config in package.json. After running react-native link I expected file.txt to appear in the Android project assets directory (/android/app/src/main/assets), and in the "Copy Bundle Resources" build phase in iOS project, but it didn't happen. react-native link ran normally and produced no errors.
My ultimate goal is to include a text file in the app bundle and have it accessible at runtime. Another option would be to wrap the text in JSON, but that way it ends up in JS bundle increasing its size by ~25%, which is probably not good. Some also recommend react-native-fs to read the file, but I'm not sure where to put it so that it's available for both Android and iOS. rnpm knows where to put assets for Android and iOS (and how to copy them to bundle), so using it seems to be the way to go, but I can't make it work with text assets.
Any thoughts or suggestions?

Answer 1

After digging around in the React Native CLI I found out that react-native link, handles only fonts. Here's the relevant piece of code from /node_modules/react-native/local-cli/link/android/copyAssets.js:
/**
* Copies each file from an array of assets provided to targetPath directory
*
* For now, the only types of files that are handled are:
* - Fonts (otf, ttf) - copied to targetPath/fonts under original name
*/
module.exports = function copyAssetsAndroid(files, targetPath) {
const assets = groupFilesByType(files);
(assets.font || []).forEach(asset =>
fs.copySync(asset, path.join(targetPath, 'fonts', path.basename(asset)))
);
};
As you can see, groupFilesByType groups all files by their MIME type (font, text, etc.), but then only fonts are actually copied to the project.
Others ran into this issue before. There was a pull request adding support for video assets, but it was not merged. Apparently the way to go is to use packager.