[bug] WARN: Name containing special chars is discouraged 'hello-world'

[andrey-zherikov]

Environment details

• Operating System+version: Windows 10
• Compiler+version: N/A
• Conan version: 2.0.9
• Python version: 3.11.2

Steps to reproduce

conan new cmake_lib -d name=hello-world -d version=1.0
conan create .  

Logs

> conan create . 

======== Exporting recipe to the cache ========
WARN: Name containing special chars is discouraged 'hello-world'
...

Note that hello-world is valid name according to docs

[memsharded]

Hi @andrey-zherikov

Thanks for your comment.
This is a valid warning, and also the docs are fine:

• The name hello-world can be used. It is not an error, and in general Conan will manage to create the packages.
• The name hello-world is discouraged, and the warning will tell about it. The reason is that so many integrations, build system, generators can struggle with filenames, variables, etc that contain these special characters that will appear. We try to test and fix the most popular built-in ones, but we have seen this failing too many times to actively discourage it.

The reason that these names have not been completely banned was to not introduce yet another breaking change in Conan 2.0. But it is ok to discourage and warn against them, because they are quite problematic in many cases.

[andrey-zherikov]

Thank you for clarification. Can this explanation be written in docs some way? It's confusing right now.

[memsharded]

Moving this to the docs repo, thanks for the feedback!

[SzBosch]

Can this warning be suppressed?

[memsharded]

At the moment it is not possible because this warning is not tagged, but there is a core:skip_warnings conf that can be used to silence warnings, maybe we could add a new tag.

In any case, this warning I'd suggest not silencing it, it would just postpone the problems, it is much better recommended to rename it and get rid of the special char. I have seen a bunch of users being later affected by it later down the road, when other tool doesn't like the special chars in filenames

[memsharded]

We are finally removing this warning in conan-io/conan#15920 for 2.3, there are too many packages in ConanCenter with "-", this would be too much to migrate.