On 8 April 2012 19:51, Robert Dewar wrote: > On 4/8/2012 1:56 PM, Jonathan Wakely wrote: >> >> The people who don't want -Wall (or >> -Wstandard) enabled are likely to be the ones who know how to use >> -Wno-all or whatever to get what they want. > > > I see no evidence that supports that guess. On the contrary, I > would guess that if -Wall is set by default, you will get lots > of (probably invalid) complaints of the sort "why is gcc complaining > at perfectly correct code", and of course in some cases those will > be false positives, so they will be valid complaints.
Again, that also applies when people use -Wall today: a false positive is unwanted even if you use -Wall, and those false positives are bugs and so having them in bugzilla is good. For the cases where the warning is valid we're doing the user a service by showing or teaching them that their code is problematic. Having to triage and close invalid bug reports from those users may be a bit tedious but still does them a service by encouraging them to improve their code. So there are positive aspects of both valid and invalid reports caused by enabling -Wall PR 51270 is just one example I happened across today where the reporter says "constness violation is accepted without any warning" then shows that g++ was being invoked without any warning options. At least some users expect to get warnings without having to request them explicitly. GCC doesn't tell you to use -Wall to get diagnostics that weren't printed but could have been, whereas when a diagnostic is issued the relevant option is shown. The option to suppress an unwanted warning is arguably more discoverable than the option to enable a warning that isn't being given. (I say arguably, because you have to know to say -Wno-xxx to suppress the warnings that print -Wxxx)
