Re: [gentoo-dev] -Werror unwanted?

[Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn]

Jeroen Roovers schrieb:
>> -Werror is basically saying that it is not safe to ship code which
>> produces warnings.
>
> An upstream demanding -Werror should work means upstream would need to
> test rather a lot more than their own favourite
> distro/architecture/library versions/kernel/userland, which isn't
> going to happen.

No. -Werror just means that if a warning is encountered, the user should
be prevented from installing the software. Then a developer looks at the
issue and determines whether it is safe to ignore or needs to be addressed.

>> I personally think that if an upstream says that no warnings must be
>> produced by the code, and a developer should look at them before
>> declaring any warnings safe, then that is best followed.
>
> Upstream does not need to take into account warnings produced by
> compilers for lesser known architectures, as explained above.

These warnings could be harmless or introduce silent breakage. The user
often can't tell.

> As an upstream development aid to check code that has just been added
> or changed, -Werror is fine, but not in the wild jungle that is Gentoo.
> You might as well just look at the warnings themselves instead of
> breaking the build system by making them fatal. In other words, for
> upstream development it's convenient, but never for our users out there.

-Werror is not convenient for anybody. When the developer has looked at
the issue, then the particular warning could be made non-fatal. hasufell
mentioned in another post the GTK+ deprecated warnings.

Note that I don't propose the current policy to be changed. I can
totally live with filtering -Werror in order to reduce maintenance work,
at the small cost mentioned above.


Best regards,
Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn