Re: [PATCH 1/1] sanity.bbclass: check for validity of TMPDIR

[Phil Blundell <pb@pbcl.net>]

On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 09:49 -0600, Mark Hatle wrote:
> On 11/14/13, 7:42 AM, Phil Blundell wrote:
> > On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 06:27 -0700, Gary Thomas wrote:
> >> Also, is "-" actually valid?  I seem to recall having problems when my build
> >> tree had the hyphen ("-") in the path.
> >
> > Paths with "-" in certainly work for me.  If there are any recipes which
> > break in that situation then we should just fix them.
> 
> We found an issue with paths that -start- with a '-', there are apparently many 
> places where paths are passed into various shell, and the initial '-' can be 
> read as an argument identifier.

Right, I can imagine that this would break fairly badly.  But if we're
going to require TMPDIR to be an absolute path (which seems perfectly
reasonable) then by definition it can't start with - so this will
presumably become a non-issue.

> I don't believe Qi Chen sent it to the list, but we built path names with all of 
> the special characters and tried to run builds.  The specific list is based on 
> the results of those tests.  The other items are already broken, and we're 
> trying to be explicit with this for end users.  (Note, it's really the TMPDIR 
> that matters.. the 'build' directory is a lot more flexible.)

Yeah, I saw the results of those tests.  My slight reservation with that
methodology is that, if any single recipe fails with a given character
in TMPDIR, no matter how obscure that recipe might be, it seems that
this is enough to make that character verboten.  For example, the
rationale for excluding "+" seems to be that it breaks tcl; if this is
the only recipe that fails then it seems like it might be worth at least
trying to fix tcl rather than excluding "+" from TMPDIRs for ever more.

But, clearly, there are some characters in the list that are "just
silly" to have in pathnames.  I don't think anybody would be surprised
to learn that "*" and "$" cause problems and blacklisting those ones
does seem quite reasonable.

p.