I think this is a good concept, and I'd like to offer some feedback.
Things I like:
- I agree that something should be done
- I think having a wall of honor on your site is a good way to promote adoption
- I think you make some good arguments
Things I question:
- .meta - As others have pointed out, it's not metadata about the project, it's part of the project. Also, as others have noted, having this be a dot file will unnecessarily hide the directory in some circumstances.
- There is no org-based namespacing in the .meta approach
- A wall of honor is probably not enough to drive adoption
Recommendations:
- I think another form of adoption driver is to discuss it on the mailing lists of 2-3 large open source projects, get them to buy into you submitting a PR for this as a non-breaking enhancement (if files not found in current dirs, look in .meta; if files not found at all create them in .meta), and then follow through with the PR for each. Some candidates are VS Code, NPM, NetBeans, Maven, and Cargo.
- etc seems a natural project config directory name. /etc is for system config files, ${BASEDIR}/etc is for project config files. There may be some conflicts here with projects already using etc, but the file's should conflict.
- what I think we need is a unified project metadata file, then links in that file could be traversed to the tool specific files and it wouldn't matter where they were - they wouldn't need to be in the root directory. Description of a Project (DOAP) [1] was a good start toward this, but the last time it had more than 1 PR a year was in 2018. There's no JSON format.
Things I like:
Things I question: Recommendations: [1] https://github.com/ewilderj/doap/wiki