On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 4:36 AM, John Maddock <john@johnmaddock.co.uk> wrote:
I'm *not* saying we should do this for 1.41, but should we have an official policy regarding compiler warnings and which ones we regard as "failures"? I realize these can get pretty busy-body at times, but if the user sees several pages of warnings when building Boost it doesn't look so good.
It not only doesn't look good. It isn't good.
No disagreement from me.
Some stats might help:
Boost-1.41 pre-beta on ubutunu-9.1 with gcc-4.4.1 produces an 11 Mb log file from the build, with 133 THOUSAND LINES of output.
And that's just from building the binaries - so a tiny subset of Boost - I dread to think what a full test build would reveal.
In fact the more I think about this, the more I feel that we should fix as much of this as we can for 1.41.
I agree. One possible approach would be to create a wiki page that describes: * A first cut at a Boost policy on warnings. * For the current release of the critical compilers, what compiler switches apply. "Critical compilers" are GCC, VC++, for now. * How a developer using bjam can run local tests with those switches. * A list of libraries known to have serious warning issues. Anything else will take too much time to be useful for 1.41.0. Would anyone like to take a cut at starting such a wiki page? Volunteer(s) needed. --Beman