Re: [gentoo-dev] Changing policy about -Werror

[Matt Turner]

On Sun, Sep 9, 2018 at 4:32 AM Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Our current -Werror policy demands unconditional removal:
> https://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/common-mistakes/index.html#-werror-compiler-flag-not-removed
>
> I think this is wrong, see bugs 665464, 665538 for a recent
> discussion why.

Bug 665464 supports the exact opposite conclusion. Werror turned a
trivial warning into a build failure.

> My point is that in *most* cases -Werror indeed should be removed,
> because upstream rarely can keep up with all possible configure,
> *FLAGS, compiler versions and arch combinations. But! In some cases
> — especially for security oriented software — this flag may be
> pertain and may be kept at maintainer's discretion.
>
> The rationale is that -Werror usually points to dangerous
> situations like uninitialized variables, pointer type mismatch or
> implicit function declaration (and much more) which may lead to
> serious security implications.

Warnings are often over unimportant details (like in this bug). It is
certainly not the case that they "usually point to dangerous
situations".

> So, if maintainer has enough manpower to support this flag, we
> should allow to keep it. Of course if it will cause long-standing
> troubles (e.g. bugs opened for a long time) QA should have power to
> remove it or demand its removal.

In the bug that started this, it was the case that the maintainer
himself had not built the package with this configuration. Nor had any
arch team that recently stabilized the package (x86, amd64, ia64, ppc,
ppc64, arm).

So again, the bug supports the opposite conclusion.

The policy is sound, and I don't think we could have found a worse bug
as supporting evidence that we should revise the policy.