As discussed in the maintainer meeting on 2024-01-29.
Mainly this is to avoid a situation where the name is parsed and
treated as a file name, mostly to protect users.
.-* and ..-* are also considered invalid because they might strip
on that separator to remove versions. Doesn't really work, but that's
what we decided, and I won't argue with it, because .-* probably
doesn't seem to have a real world application anyway.
We do still permit a 1-character name that's just "-", which still
poses a similar risk in such a situation. We can't start disallowing
trailing -, because a non-zero number of users will need it and we've
seen how annoying and painful such a change is.
What matters most is preventing a situation where . or .. can be
injected, and to just get this done.
This has been the behaviour before Nix 2.4. It was dropped in a rewrite
in 759947bf72, allowing the creation of
store paths that aren't considered valid by older Nix versions or other
Nix tooling.
Nix 2.4 didn't ship in NixOS until 22.05, and stdenv.mkDerivation in
nixpkgs drops leading periods since April 2022, so it's unlikely anyone
is relying on the current lax behaviour.
Closes#9091.
Change-Id: I4a57bd9899e1b0dba56870ae5a1b680918a18ce9
Robert Hensing