Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 16:31:29 +0200 (SAT) From: Robert Nordier <rnordier@nordier.com> To: peter@netplex.com.au (Peter Wemm) Cc: fenner@parc.xerox.com, bde@zeta.org.au, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: -Werror Message-ID: <199901201431.QAA02757@ceia.nordier.com> In-Reply-To: <199901201228.UAA19912@spinner.netplex.com.au> from Peter Wemm at "Jan 20, 99 08:28:18 pm"
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Peter Wemm wrote: > Bill Fenner wrote: > > Or should simply be caught by --don't-be-lazy . -Werror doesn't help > > when the committer thinks that it's so obvious and simple that there's > > no need to even try building it. > > > > Bill > > The last time the warnings, etc, thing came up, the consensis was: > > In development mode, all practical warnings turned on. > In release mode, turn them off. It's no use scaring the users about > something they have little or no control over. > > Personally, I'd be quite happy to have -Werror turned on during > development, providing that it doesn't make it into any releases. One consequence of -Werror is that is forces a trade-off between o the number of warnings it is practical to turn on o the amount of rewriting of existing code it is practical to do Particularly in the case of a compiler (versus a good-quality lint tool), warnings have a probability of accuracy that ranges from fairly low to extremely high. The effect -Werror has is to force a binary choice: either take the warning completely seriously (and rewrite any correct code that confuses the compiler), or turn the warning off. For example, compiled with -Wall, the code fragment if (x = y) x = z + 1 & 7; causes two warnings suggest parentheses around assignment used as truth value suggest parentheses around + or - in operand of & but rewriting to eliminate the errors would violate a style(9) guideline (unnecessary parentheses). There's an awful lot of BSD code like this, that could cause huge {Net,Open}BSD diffs if rewritten. So (to give just one example) if -Werror if used, -Wall becomes problematic. And so -Werror may result in useful warnings getting turned off rather than on. -- Robert Nordier To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199901201431.QAA02757>