addition of -Wall to default flags (redhat-rpm-config-8.0.38-1)
Nicholas Miell
nmiell at comcast.net
Sun Aug 7 00:31:13 UTC 2005
On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 16:55 -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> Nicholas Miell wrote:
> > I'd argue that any upstream package which includes -Werror by default is
> > broken, considering how often gcc warnings change.
>
> And I argue that we apparently must come to a state where -Werror is
> enabled automatically. The current state, aggravated by adding -Wall,
> is that warnings are ignored. The result: bugs the compiler finds are
> no fixed. I even found one case where the _FORTIFY_SOURCE magic found a
> buffer overflow and the maintainer hasn't seen it.
>
> It is crucial that packages are changed to have zero warnings.
> Otherwise these bugs remain unnoticed since people think warnings are OK
> and don't care. The "apparent" part is that using -Werror is the only
> way to do this. Without enforcement people _think_ there are more
> important things to do than fixing warnings.
>
> Yes, it might mean that an update to a new gcc version means required
> changes. But guess what? Whenever a warning pops up there is likely a
> good reason for it and it is worthwhile spending time on it. Just like
> all these signed vs unsigned warnings in gcc 4. They almost all the
> time warrant looking at the code.
Nothing stops you from doing internal builds with -Werror and then
fixing all the warnings before you make a release.
However, when you ship software that won't compile, your end users are
either going to remove -Werror and rebuild or they're going to switch to
something that works out-of-the-metaphorical-box. You've gained nothing.
--
Nicholas Miell <nmiell at comcast.net>
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