On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:06 PM, Stewart, Robert <Robert.Stewart@sig.com> wrote:
Emil Dotchevski wrote:
My point exactly. This confirms that it is preferable, for that company, to disable some warnings instead of "fixing" them.
Disabling some warnings *is* the appropriate fix and I've never claimed otherwise.
Sure, the question is who is to decide whether a particular warning should be disabled. I doubt that any library developer tolerates warnings in their code, except for the ones they've decided should be disabled. However, the case of matching opinions isn't interesting, this discussion is about how to handle situations when the library developer thinks a particular warning should be disabled (or not enabled) and someone else thinks otherwise.
This in turn leads to another interesting question: why don't they fix such warnings anyway? After all, that's what they're asking library developers to do for them, right? At least in some cases, I'm sure, the answer is "because that would do more harm than good" (as far as this particular company is concerned.)
If there is no good way to change the library code to prevent some particular warning from a compiler, then that should be documented and user's should be told that it can be silenced only by disabling that warning. I've never suggested the need to do more in that case.
We're back to square one with this argument. Obviously, if someone reports a warning and a library developer thinks there is a good way to fix the warning, it'll be fixed and that will be the end of it. The interesting case, again, is when there is no "good" way, for some definition of "good". It really is a problem of standardization. You don't see people arguing about whether a compile error should be fixed, such matter is resolved by fixes, workarounds and bug reports because there's agreed-upon authority (the ANSI standard) which is presumed correct. But warnings are issued in cases when the ANSI standard prohibits issuing an error, and this makes it difficult to craft a general policy that would be reasonable for everyone. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode