-----Original Message----- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Raymond Wan Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2010 6:53 AM To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] Towards a Warning free code policy proposal <snip>
As a user who is somewhat following the discussion, I have to say that the approach used by gcc in terms of handling warnings is good. Warnings are shown and you have to add flags such as -Wall to disable them. That at least forces users to do something because of the warnings -- either act on it by looking at their code or realizing that the warning is unimportant and to find the flag that would remove it. Perhaps a more viable solution is to produce warnings and errors that could be searched in a part of the Boost documentation (i.e., dedicated to dealing with warnings) that says what caused the warning and how to disable it if the user is satisfied that it is not important.
I can see why this issue would be brought up -- boost warnings are intimidating to users. But (IMHO), removing warnings will make users not knowledgeable in Boost (such as myself) to becoming more sloppy. Instead of that, maybe keeping the warnings but having documentation specifically explaining how they can be suppressed might be a bit better
https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/Guidelines/WarningsGuidelines tells you quite a lot about warnings, including gcc and MSVC (It's a bit thin on other compilers - more info please). than
having them off by default for users.
I'd like to see Boost getting rid of warnings that come from its code, so that all warnings are relevant to the user. The above, and references therein, (written for Boost developers) may still be useful to users. Paul --- Paul A. Bristow, Prizet Farmhouse, Kendal LA8 8AB UK +44 1539 561830 07714330204 pbristow@hetp.u-net.com