"-"/dash/hypen character not allowed in variant keys

[k-dominik]

Hello! First of all thank you very much for the awesome work you do here!

Actual Behavior

When building using build variants, including libstdcxx-ng in the pins, an exception is raised informing one, that no - characters are allowed in variant keys. So effectively, one cannot pin libstdcxx-ng.

The error:

  File "/opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/conda_build/cli/main_render.py", line 186, in main
    return execute(sys.argv[1:])
  File "/opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/conda_build/cli/main_render.py", line 152, in execute
    variants = get_package_variants(args.recipe, config)
  File "/opt/conda/lib/python3.6/site-packages/conda_build/variants.py", line 487, in get_package_variants
    raise ValueError("Error in config {}: {}".format(f, str(e)))
ValueError: Error in config pins.yaml: Variant configuration errors: 
['"-" is a disallowed character in variant keys.  Key was: libstdcxx-ng']

Expected Behavior

Package names with hyphens/dashes should not break the pinning behaviour.

Steps to Reproduce

If you really need an example for this one, I could draft it, but here, the piece of code that causes that issue is clear. The question is, whether this behaviour is intended, and whether there are tricks to get around it.

conda-build/conda_build/variants.py

Lines 123 to 127 in 54ab018

	def validate_spec(spec):
	errors = []
	for key in spec:
	if '-' in key:
	errors.append('"-" is a disallowed character in variant keys. Key was: {}'.format(key))

Output of conda info

     active environment : base
    active env location : /opt/conda
            shell level : 1
       user config file : /home/conda/.condarc
 populated config files : /home/conda/.condarc
          conda version : 4.5.4
    conda-build version : 3.7.1
         python version : 3.6.4.final.0
       base environment : /opt/conda  (writable)
           channel URLs : https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/linux-64
                          https://conda.anaconda.org/conda-forge/noarch
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/main/linux-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/main/noarch
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/free/linux-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/free/noarch
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/r/linux-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/r/noarch
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/pro/linux-64
                          https://repo.anaconda.com/pkgs/pro/noarch
          package cache : /opt/conda/pkgs
                          /home/conda/.conda/pkgs
       envs directories : /opt/conda/envs
                          /home/conda/.conda/envs
               platform : linux-64
             user-agent : conda/4.5.4 requests/2.18.4 CPython/3.6.4 Linux/4.4.0-128-generic ubuntu/16.04 glibc/2.23
                UID:GID : 30014:30014
             netrc file : None
           offline mode : False

[nehaljwani]

Closing as duplicate of #2885

[k-dominik]

@nehaljwani thank you so much - and sorry, i did a fair ammount of searching to find similar issues, but didn't find the referenced one.

[github-actions]

Hi there, thank you for your contribution!

This issue has been automatically locked because it has not had recent activity after being closed.

Please open a new issue if needed.

Thanks!