Re: Meson feedback as a user

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 2 July 2017 at 17:02, Philip Withnall <philip tecnocode co uk> wrote:
> On Sun, 2017-07-02 at 15:37 +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> > On Sun, 2 Jul 2017 at 16:29, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>
> > wrote:

> > There is a subset of warnings you want for C - and those should go in
> > Meson's warning_level option. Differently projects have very
> > different requirements: there is no "one size fits all" or alias for
> > an ever changing set of warnings - otherwise we'd all run with
> > -Wextra and -Werror.
>
> The statements
> “There is a subset of warnings you want for C”
> and
> “there is no "one size fits all" or alias for an ever changing set of
> warnings”
> seem to be incompatible.

I was on my phone, so there's a missing "small" from "there is a subset".

The minimal subset of warnings is basically -Wall, considering that
GCC tends to promote new warnings in there across versions, as well as
adding them to -Wextra. Anything else is negotiable, and needs to be
validated against the current project code base on different
platforms, compilers, and versions of the compiler, before toggling
it.

If you want to have a blanket option, use Meson's 'warning_level=2' or
'warning_level=3', and then be prepared to battle against compiler
changes, as well as dependency changes.

> AX_COMPILER_FLAGS is meant to provide that
> ‘subset of warnings you want for C’. If you think the set of warnings
> it enables is incorrect, please bring that up with me (in a different
> ML thread, I don’t want to take this one off topic).

I don't think we are ever going to agree on the usefulness of
AX_COMPILER_FLAGS, so I'd rather not waste anybody's time.

My point is:

 - use 'warning_level' in Meson to enable different compiler warnings
 - if you want to add compiler flags to Meson, submit a patch for the
existing 'warning_level' option so that the options are per-platform,
per-compiler, and per-language
 - considering the amount of compiler flags that are per-project, and
the maintenance burden they impose on maintainers, newcomer
developers, and CI, I'd rather you figured out the list of warnings
*you* need and, especially, that *you* are willing to commit to,
instead of a blanket option that requires disabling for everyone while
you figure out how to fix a code base

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
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[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]