Custom ELF sections for attaching stringy metadata

I would like to be able to associate some stringy, easily-extractible key-value pairs with my ELF executables.

I've noticed gcc-compiled ELFs have a .comment section

$ readelf -p .comment a.out 

So I tried to replicate that:

main.c:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(){ puts("Hello world"); return 0; }
const char str[] __attribute__((section(".meta"))) = "hello meta world";

Test:

$ readelf -p .meta a.out 
String dump of section '.meta':
  [     0]  hello meta world

or

 $ readelf -p .meta a.out | sed -n 's/^[^]]*]  //p'
   hello meta world

This works.

Is there a better way to attach such stringly key-value pairs to an ELF file (without breaking it down to multiple files)? Is there a namespace (e.g. .user.meta) for user sections that would prevent me from breaking something?