using the ideas of Patrizio Neff.

In particular, this code should handle real 3d continua, as well
as Neff-style Cosserat shells.

This initial commit only adds a lot of infrastructure.

[[Imported from SVN: r7339]]

[[Imported from SVN: r6703]]

[[Imported from SVN: r5936]]

new application to test the convergence order of geodesic finite elements on a harmonic maps problem

[[Imported from SVN: r5764]]

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