> On Apr 11, 2018, at 11:44 PM, David Gibson <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 09:26:18AM -0500, Kumar Gala wrote: >> >>> On Apr 11, 2018, at 12:46 AM, David Gibson <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>> On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 11:42:14AM -0500, Kumar Gala wrote: >>>> Curious if there is a reason that the alias node name char set is limited to [a-z][0-9] and ‘-‘. >>>> >>>> I’m guessing some historic reason, so curious as why that limited >>>> set. [I really want an emoji in my alias name ;)] >>> >>> I'm pretty sure that limitation goes all the way back to IEEE1275, >>> though I'm not sure of the rationale. Even if the set was widened you >>> couldn't really have an emoji since an alias - like all node names - >>> is a bag-o'-bytes, not a Unicode string. >> >> Any reason not to update the spec and allow alias names to be >> treated the same as any property name? > > Well, I don't think they should allow anything more than node names, > rather than property names, although I think the two are identical at > the moment. The reason is that aliases can appear in paths > "alias/foo/bar" so we don't want to expand the set of valid path > characters. > > The only printable character I can immediately see as being a definite > problem is '/'. > > Back in the OF days there might have been more restrictions based on > special characters in the Forth environment, to prevent paths with > aliases being confused for something else. Not sure. Matching the char set for node names seems reasonable to me. >> I was joking about the emoji bit. > > I thought you probably were :) > > I would turn the question around a bit, though: do we have a > compelling reason to expand the set. Aliases are kind of like > identifiers and usually languages work best if identifiers have > characters taken from a fairly small set. Mostly we seem to use ‘_’ in a lot of .dts files and figured I’d raise the discussion on the topic. Since we started warning about it, wanted to see what direction we might want to take. - k-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe devicetree-spec" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
