On Tue, 11 Feb 2025, Hal Murray wrote:
For example, I just submitted an MR to fix a warning for something which
is perfectly legal, but which broke the build here due to -Werror.
Thanks. Just curious. What OS/Distro found that?
It's clang 6. The OS doesn't enter into it.
Turning on -Werror in general is a really bad idea. The "nonportability"
in question is the huge variation across compilers on what produces
warnings. There are lots of things which are perfectly legal C code but
which the compiler may decide to warn about, just in case you *may* have
done something unintended. There's no way to predict when that happens,
so turning on -Werror by default is just a recipe for broken builds.
--disable-Werror will turn it off. My expectation is that with a few
fixes like yours we won't have many problems. If that turns out to be
wrong, we can change the default.
About "the huge variation across compilers"...
Is that a real problem? If so, how much of the problem is old old
compilers vs new compilers? How much do we care about it being easy to
port to ancient gear vs finding a rare bug in modern environments?
Warnings are for developers, not end users. Inflicting broken builds on
end users is far more likely to piss people off than to get useful
feedback.
It's also not just about old vs. new in the direction you think. It's not
at all uncommon for *newer* compilers to issue new warnings.
Fred Wright
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