(Splitting out from Gerrit.)
So before we go much further in these reviews which are all very much
related, let's use one of them to agree on the general direction.
Here's what I would like to get:
- Report all reasonable warnings. Warnings are IMHO quite useful because
they can hint about possible problems in the code. We are also currently
warning-free on reasonable platforms, which is a good things.
- Make an optimized build with debugging symbols present. Optimizations are
in general case important because they can eliminate all sorts of
bottlenecks from the code while not making the code any less readable in
the process. That's a win for the user and for the programmer, too.
The problems with these criteria are that some compilers produce a ton of
warnings which are of boguous quality (at least some version of MSVC per
users' reports). Therefore it makes sense to selectively suppress the
useless warnings on these crazy platforms. I haven't seen a MSVC output
with -Wall yet, so I have to rely on people telling me that it is indeed
insane, and suppressing these warnings in some other method won't really
fly for various reasons. My opinion is that the warnings should be present
on unknown compilers, though, so my suggestion for a policy is to "show
warnings unless known to be unbearable").
Re optimizations, I currently don't see a use case for disabling them. Am I
missing something?
Re debug symbols, I find them valuable in my work, and I expect all
developers to be able to report bugs with backtraces and have asserts
active at all times (which rules out CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release or MinSizeRel
or others that pass -DNDEBUG (?) to the compiler). I also think that most
users actually obtain a prebuilt package of Trojita, so for them it doesn't
matter because we should be using whatever is common on their
distro/platform/...
I'm unsure about the asserts. Do we want them on in release code? The
temptation to go for speed is a big one, but the beenfits of having extra
safety in an application which deals with random crap from the network is a
very good argument as well...
Opinion are welcome, we should get them to know what to do with Pali's
patches on Gerrit.
Cheers,
Jan
--
Trojitá, a fast Qt IMAP e-mail client -- http://trojita.flaska.net/
