Werror (Was: Deferenceing...)

[terra gnome org (Morten Welinder)]

Colin Walters wrote:

> The best way in my opinion is to use -std=c89, along
> with -Wall -Werror and a bunch of other -Wblah flags.

Translation: "Everyone who is not running a machine/compiler/OS that is
completely identical to mine is a dork and deserves not to have things
compile."

-Werror is just plain anti-social behaviour.

Examples:

* Linux has the wrong type for iconv.  I could fix various code to
  use the right type and have every Linux box' compile break.  That
  would be fun, right?

* I've got pragmas in system headers.  gcc warns on those so nothing
  is going to compile with -Werror.

* I run a different gcc version than most other people.  The set of
  might-be-used-uninitialized warnings is different between versions.
  Often one is not a subset of the other, so you can fix for one, but
  have to break the other.

* A different optimization level can cause new warnings to appear.

* My pid_t is different from yours.  That's painfully obvious when
  someone printfs it.  Getting such problems fixed in the source can
  take years.

* isdigit.  ***Sigh***  At least glib nowadays has g_ascii_isdigit
  because just getting people to understand that they are calling
  isdigit incorrectly is a major task.  Warning for me (and in
  extreme cases a crash at runtime), but with -Werror no compile.

* "char", is that signed or unsigned?

So please bury -Werror somewhere deep underground where it will not
be found for a few centuries.

Morten