Allow formats other than JSON for metadata of tasks

[benridley]

Use Case

Task metadata is currently only accepted as JSON, however due to the frequency of editing and writing tasks and metadata the limitations of JSON make it somewhat unwieldy. (As opposed to regular Puppet module metadata, which often never needs to be touched after its written once)

For example, JSON doesn't support multiline strings which can be really useful when writing descriptions of tasks (and providing examples etc). In addition the trailing commas are a frequent source of frustration for us. Comments can be useful as well when describing metadata.

Describe the Solution You Would Like

Support for some other, more human-writable formats. The format would be identifiable from the file extension of the metadata and parsed appropriately.

Describe Alternatives You've Considered

YAML is the obvious choice, perhaps TOML.

[nicklewis]

I agree that this would be a UX improvement, but realistically it's not something we can do at this point.

Aside from the implementation complexities (multiple metadata files with the same basename and different extensions, performance implications of loading many yaml files), the fact that there are multiple tools that run tasks but with different release lifecycles means this change would fracture the ecosystem for quite some time.