Re: GNOME CVS: gnome-core martin

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes:

> If you really want a build to stay warning-free, you need -Werror to
> be the default. Otherwise, the few people who use it will spend too
> much of their time cleaning up after the people who don't. If someone
> really needs to build and can't fix the warnings, they can take the
> extra step of turning them off.
> 
> Not that I have any say on what the flags are for gnome-core - but
> I've noticed that modules which default to -Werror on generally have
> no warnings, whereas every gnome2 module that doesn't, gtk+ included,
> has a fair amount of warnings in the build, and build warnings tend to
> stick aroud long enough that I think most people who claim to do
> special cleanup passes to fix warnings are mistaken in their
> recollection.

Well, the problem in gnome-core is that these are not just "warnings",
but real errors - 95% of all "warnings" I get in gnome-core are missing
function prototypes - and in the special case of gnome-core, there's a
95% chance that a missing function prototype means that the function
doesn't exist anymore (in GTK+, libgnome, whereever).

It's just more convenient for to get a compiler error (and I can still do
a "make -k" if I want) than just getting a warning and an undefined symbol
later on - but "later on" means when linking - and for shared libraries
at runtime.

I don't want my code to compile and then crash at runtime due to undefined
symbols in one of my shared libraries - I prefer getting a compiler error
so that I can fix the undefined symbol right away.

> > besides the fact these cflags are gcc specific.
>  
> It's best to enable -Werror only when compiling with gcc - nautilus is
> an example of a module that gets this right (or bonobo-activation if
> you want a GNOME2 example).

It's a macro in gnome-common/macros2 which checks whether it's GCC - and
for --enable-compile-warnings=error, it also includes some GCC-specific
compiler warnings, but checks whether the compiler actually supports them.

> Anyway, I hope -Werror continues to be used more. Many warnings are
> real bugs!

Yes, especially in gnome-core.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)