Repository Metadata

Currently we have a number of small metadata files:

• RELEASE.version.txt (detemines the latest release of the artifact)
• SNAPSHOT.version.txt (determines the timestamp/build# of the latest build of the artifact)
• LATEST.version.txt (determines the latest build of the artifact, whether it be a timestamp or a release)
• plugins.xml (maps plugin prefixes to artifact Id within the group)

With the advent of version ranges, this will require use to get a list of versions for an artifact also. This has gotten to "critical mass" of metadata that we should move to handling general directory metadata.

We can safely remove/rename plugins.xml now since there hasn't been a release cut that uses it, and there are not significant amounts to convert in the repo. We should continue to read the others, but deprecate it.