Summary

According to the Collection structure chapter of the docs:

Role names are now limited to contain only lowercase alphanumeric characters, plus _ and start with an alpha character.

However, I've observed that role names can start with an underscore _ character without causing any issues. I have tried this with Ansible versions 2.9, 2.10, 2.11, 2.12, 2.13, 2.14, 2,15, 2.16 and 2.17, and none of them had problems consuming a role with such a name. Ansible Galaxy also imports the role without any issues.

I understand that a role name like this might not be aesthetically pleasing, but there is a good reason for it. We recently added an Ansible role for common shared tasks to the [prometheus ansible collection](https://github.com/prometheus-community/ansible). The role is named _common (fqcn prometheus.prometheus._common) to distinguish it from the other roles in the collection, as it is an internal role that's only supposed to be used by the other roles and not directly by a user.

Related: ansible/ansible-lint#4370

Issue Type

Bug Report

Component Name

core

Ansible Version

N/A

Configuration

N/A

OS / Environment

N/A

Steps to Reproduce

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Expected Results

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Actual Results

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Code of Conduct

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