Warn or issue error when recipe contains unrecognized variable

[Adam Dingle]

I think Bake should issue a warning or error if a recipe contains a variable it doesn't recognize. For example, I mistakenly wrote a recipe containing the following:

programs.test {
  source = foo.vala
}

Above, "source" should be "sources". When I ran bake, it ignored the "source" variable and simply did nothing. That was pretty confusing. If it had printed "warning: unknown variable 'source'" then I would have immediately realized what was wrong.

[shuerhaaken (shkn)]

A similar thing also happend to me.

Warnings are good, but maybe it should be possible to add some user defined vars without warnings.
For these vars there could be a prefix like e.g. 'user-*' or '_*'.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

Yes, this is a bit of a pitfall. Not sure the correct solution - all variables are supposed to be supported and the modules scan for ones they know. Also users can define variables. However, there is a risk of user variables colliding with module variables so the 'user-*' prefix (or similar) sounds like a good solution.