Align environment variable propagation names with POSIX and define normalization rules#4944
Open
pellared wants to merge 7 commits intoopen-telemetry:mainfrom
Open
Align environment variable propagation names with POSIX and define normalization rules#4944pellared wants to merge 7 commits intoopen-telemetry:mainfrom
pellared wants to merge 7 commits intoopen-telemetry:mainfrom
Conversation
pellared
changed the title
Member
Author
|
CC @open-telemetry/semconv-cicd-approvers |
MrAlias
approved these changes
Mar 13, 2026
Co-authored-by: Tyler Yahn <MrAlias@users.noreply.github.com>
pellared
added
enhancement
kamphaus
approved these changes
Mar 14, 2026
Kielek
approved these changes
Mar 17, 2026
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
5 participants
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
This PR aligns environment variable context propagation naming with POSIX.1-2024 and defines normalization rules for propagation keys.
Fixes #4914
Prototype open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib#8678
Note that the changes are in a document which has status "Alpha".
Motivation
The current text refers to platform-specific restrictions but does not define how invalid propagation keys should be handled. In particular, it does not clearly address cases such as:
-(which is used e.g. by https://github.com/openzipkin/b3-propagation) or other disallowed charactersChanges
Propagation keys MUST be normalized to valid environment variable names by:
__when the name would otherwise begin with a digitBenefits