Clarify case-insensitive env carrier lookup#5180
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Pull request overview
Adds clarification to the environment carrier specification to help implementers understand that case-insensitive environment lookups (notably on Windows) can cause Get to match variables that differ only by case, despite key normalization rules.
Changes:
- Documented the behavior of
Geton platforms with case-insensitive environment variable lookup (e.g., Windows). - Added a concrete example showing how
TRACEPARENTmay resolve to an env var namedtraceparenton Windows.
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@open-telemetry/semconv-cicd-approvers, @maryliag, @jack-berg, @marcalff, @xrmx, @pichlermarc, @martincostello, PTAL |
martincostello
approved these changes
Jun 26, 2026
kamphaus
approved these changes
Jun 26, 2026
reyang
approved these changes
Jun 26, 2026
maryliag
approved these changes
Jun 26, 2026
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with commit Jun 29, 2026
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I think adding this note may be helpful for implementation and troubleshooting.
Personally, even though I was fully aware of the behavior on Windows, I still forgot about it at least twice while working on the implementations for OTel JS (open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js#6853 (comment)) and OTel Go (open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib#9112).
In OTel Go, I even decided to include this in method documentation.