15375 2024-01-30 21:52:32 +0000 Define what a valid layer name can contain (and what it cannot) 2026-10-01 15:48:12 +0000 1 1 7 Build System, Metadata & Runtime BitBake bitbake 5.0 x86 Multiple NEW Medium normal 6.2 1 tim.orling richard.purdie poky.bs.watcher poky.watcher randy.macleod --- --- Yes (doc changes required) oldest_to_newest 98066 0 tim.orling 2024-01-30 21:52:32 +0000 In working on #15373, I discovered that the original 2013 commit of layerindex-web had defined that a valid layer name could only contain alphanumeric characters and dashes: https://git.yoctoproject.org/layerindex-web/commit/layerindex?id=2eb5f38b21396b6584f532f9bb763918f0860cdd def clean_name(self): name = self.cleaned_data['name'].strip() if re.compile(r'[^a-z0-9-]').search(name): raise forms.ValidationError("Name must only contain alphanumeric characters and dashes") if name.startswith('-'): raise forms.ValidationError("Name must not start with a dash") if name.endswith('-'): raise forms.ValidationError("Name must not end with a dash") if '--' in name: raise forms.ValidationError("Name cannot contain consecutive dashes") return name But clearly nothing is preventing a layer from having a . in the name, it simply was not supported in layerindex. meta-luneos and friends have been successfully using -backports-2.8 and so on layers since zeus. This led to me to a question of what might be possible? underscore : an underscore works (we probably don't want it given overrides confusion) so you could create a layer with 'bitbake-layers create-layer meta-foo_bar-1.2' and the resulting example_1.0.bb recipe will build. The examples in the docs show an underscore... https://docs.yoctoproject.org/dev-manual/layers.html?highlight=_xyz#creating-your-own-layer "meta-GUI_xyz". non alphanumeric characters %:! These will not work with 'bitbake-layers create-layer' because they are invalid format characters for how Python is parsing the input (plus they probably cause other problems with bash/shell) ValueError: unsupported format character ':' (0x3a) at index 44 To be sure, other characters like * & / \ are also probably not valid, but I only tested the three (%:!). unicode, emojis. It turns out you can use the ":tada:" unicode character and 'bitbake-layers create-layer meta-<the :tada: emoji>' will happily create a layer. In this case it will fail to parse: bb.parse.ParseError: ... unparsed line: 'BBFILE_PATTERN_meta-<the :tada: character> = "^${LAYERDIR}/"' This then made me realize we probably need to actually define what is valid and put in checks to ensure the supported characters/pattern are being used.