MetaData for Code that should be versioned with the source

This is a scratchpad for listing current problems and ideas related to code metadata. The idea is to keep it very general at first and split this later into sub-projects.

• we can only store classes and methods in git

Where do we use methods now to store metadata?

• we use the class "XXXManifest" for storing metadata
• package comment is class comment of that class
• we store false positives and "turned off" rules per method there
• we tag abstract classed using a method #isAbstract

What are the problems?

• not uniform. Every time we want to add metadata, we have to reinvent how to do it (even if we use the manifest)
• Manifest based rule data is stored as serialized Ring1 objects
• it contains a date (which uses memory) --> we can get the data info from the git commit
• there is no cleanup: if a method gets removed, the old data stays in the system forever