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Re: Avoiding compiler warnings
On Fri, 17 Aug 2012, Roland McGrath wrote:
> > (Practice from other tools would be a --enable-werror/--disable-werror
> > configure option, defaulting to --enable-werror during development (I
> > suppose based on the value of RELEASE in version.h) and --disable-werror
> > for releases.)
>
> I don't think changing the default based on such a notion is proper at all.
> It's especially important to catch subtle regressions when building releases.
The point is that -Werror is something for developers rather than for
users; showing up warnings as build breakage for developers is useful in a
way that doing so for users isn't (release builds should "just work").
> When --disable-werror is likely to be needed is when using a much older (or
> extremely new) compiler. But I am not at all convinced that there should
> be any automagic logic for disabling it at all. We should just make sure
> that there are no (unsuppressed) warnings for builds with either the latest
> GCC or the GCC version recommended by README (i.e. today 4.8ish-trunk and 4.6).
One thing users may do is use a GCC version more recent than the one that
was current at release time, so producing warnings that couldn't possibly
have been envisaged by developers.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com