MetaClass -

General

Why aren't Package Attributes supported?: Package Attributes are no longer supported by the MetaClass toolkit. The reason being that the java.lang.Package class does not have an associated ClassLoader and usually metadata is loaded from the ClassLoader. Packages can be defined multiple times in a JVM but the java.lang.Package object is JVM wide. This required that the user pass in a specific ClassLoader. Even then the one Package can reasonably have multiple definitions of metadata in the same ClassLoader but loaded from different Jars. It is unclear what strategy would be required to resolve this issue as sometimes it would be useful to merge the metadata from multiple sources and in other cases one set of metadata will overide another set of metadata. For these reasons Package Attributes were removed from MetaClass.