MySQL variant names

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 10:39 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Sep 15, 2014, at 2:43 PM, Bradley Giesbrecht wrote:
>>
>> Is a dot "." a legal character in variant names?
>
> Oh, you're right, we have been avoiding dots in variant names. We have a lint check that says "use [A-Za-z0-9_]+ only".
>
> Using "-" in a variant name probably actually causes a problem (because it could get confused with the syntax for disabling a variant). However I'm not sure if "." is really a problem or if we were just being overly cautious and could relax that restriction.

Personally I would be in favour of +mysql5.5, +mariadb10.0 (also in
favour of renaming the port to mysql-5.5), but then again we have a
zillion of ports using +gcc48, +python34, +clang34 etc. If there is no
reason not to allow the dots, it would be nice to allow them, but then
we also need  to start thinking about ways to gradually replace the
option names in all other ports.

Mojca