[rules-dev] @metadata: status; compatibility issues

The current parser handles metadata annotations '@' *Identifier* '(' *Text* ')' so that the annotations for one entity (e.g., a rule) are available as a Map<String,Object>, where the key is given by the *Identifier *and the value of the entry is available according to *if* *Text* can be *completely* parsed as *Identifier* '=' *Expression*(where *Expression* is whatever the DRL parser accepts as an expression, i.e., an extended subset of Java expressions) *then* the value is a Map<String,String> *else the *value is a String, with trimmed leading and trailing white space, but preserving all embedded white space Changes compared to 5.1.1: - no Map was ever returned in 5.1.1, - @m( "foo" ) in 5.1.1. returned "foo", but 5.2.0 returns "\"foo\"". - @m( "foo", "bar" ) in 5.1.1. returned "foo\", \"bar", but 5.2.0 returns "\"foo\", \"bar\"" - comments between "@...(" and ")" are now handled consistently but were not in 5.1.1 Possibly considered a problem for 5.2.0 or later: - No check is made for duplicate "outer" map keys; entries are overwritten. - Repeated "inner" map keys produce concatenated entries, e.g. @m( k = 1, k = "a" ) returns "1a" as the value for key "k". - Returning (arbitrary) expressions, unchanged, as String now may cause incompatibilitie with more sophisticated processing (if this ever should be considered). -W