Robert Dewar <de...@adacore.com> writes: >> I don't think gcc, g++, gfortran, etc, have ever made a commitment >> to producing textually identical warnings and errors for given inputs >> across different releases. It seems ridiculous to require that, >> especially if it stands in the way of improving the diagnostics >> or introducing finer-grained -W control. >> >> E.g. Florian's complaint was that we shouldn't have warnings that >> are not under the control of any -W options. But by your logic >> we couldn't change that either, because all those "[enabled by default]"s >> would become "[-Wnew-option]"s. >> > I am not saying you can't change it, just that it is indeed a big > earthquake. No of course there is no commitment not to make changes. > But you have to be aware that when you make changes like this, the > impact is very significant in real production environments, and > gcc is as you know extensively used in such environments. > > What I am saying here is that this is worth some discussion on what > the best approach is.
But what's the basis for that discussion going to be? I first made this suggestion on gcc@, which is the best list we have for getting user feedback, and no user made this objection. And when I worked in an environment where I had direct contact with GCC-using customers, none of them gave any indication that they were expecting textual stability between releases. If you know of people who are using non-Ada languages this way then please describe their set-up. If you don't, how are we going to know how such hypothetical users are going to react? E.g. how many of those users will have heard of "sed"? I thought the trend these days was to move towards -Werror, so that for many people the expected output is to get no warnings at all. And bear in mind that the kind of warnings that are not under -W control tend to be those that are so likely to be a mistake that no-one has ever had an incentive to make them optional. I find it hard to believe that significant numbers of users are not fixing the sources of those warnings and are instead requiring every release of GCC to produce warnings with a particular wording. Thanks, Richard
