Re: compiler warnings, -Werror, etc.

[Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org>]

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Dan Winship <danw gnome org> wrote:
> By that logic, you should never pass any extra -W options beyond -Wall
> either, since those warnings apparently aren't important.
>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_implication_%28rule_of_inference%29
is not invertible like that. :p

> Don't we have build bots somewhere? They could check this stuff... lots
> of other projects do that. (Having a build-warning-detecting bot would
> also help for the case where the warning only shows up with -O2, but the
> developer compiles with -O0 for ease of debugging...)
>
We're GNOME, we don't do QA. ;)
This is actually the core of the problem. If we had a buildbot like
for example WebKit, we'd have try bots that would compile with -Werror
and would flag the commit before it's committed. Just like they would
run make check and flock you for that.
But instead, we're very laissez-faire. So much in fact, that we don't
care about bugs that other people introduce when we're busy doing
something else...

> The problem isn't "old gcc releases", it's "either older or newer gcc
> releases". If you want everyone to get the same warnings, you need to
> require that everyone use a specific version of gcc, and compile with
> the same optimization level.
>
For random git checkouts, I would definitely favor doing that.

Benjamin