Robert Dewar wrote:
[ ... ]
But then don't use -Wall. If you are asking for -Wall, you
want all new warnings, and you have to undertake to investigate
them. If you don't want this kind of movement, then specify the
precise warnings you want (even that may generate new warnings
if a given specific warning is improved).
I must say I am really surprised at the claim that this particular
warning will cause lots of new warnings. Do we really have thousands
of packages with this kind of dubious construct?
While I agree with most of what you said Robert, reality is I have run
into long time GCC users with extremely large codebases who use -Wall
-Werror and go ballistic any time new warnings are added (the process to
get even trivial fixes into their codebase is, umm, lengthy to put it
mildly).
I've argued with them on multiple occasions that using -Wall in this
manner was a bad idea and that choosing a set of -Wblah warnings to use
instead would save them lots of time and headaches, but the message
never sticks.
I think (as always) we need to find a balance between throwing
everything *we* find valuable in -Wall and avoiding all changes to
accommodate users on the other end of the spectrum. With that in mind
I'd ask Ian to chime in and say something about the # of warnings we
found in our own codebase vs how many of those warnings represented real
bugs vs false positives.
Jeff
