Emil Dotchevski wrote:
On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Vladimir Prus <vladimir@codesourcery.com> wrote:
John Maddock 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. So my suggestion would be that we have two test-runners (if we have any spare!) that build with warnings-as-errors, maybe:
-Wall -pedantic -Wstrict-aliasing -fstrict-aliasing -Werror
I would remove -pedantic, but otherwise, it's a very good idea.
This is the problem: *you* would remove -pedantic, but others want it.
I would be happy about having -pedantic there, if there's demand. But my guess that putting it there now will result in every single test being a failure.
Unfortunately, recent discussion left me with the impression that few folks care.
It is not about caring, once again the argument is about a personal preference: is the ugliness and decreased readability that is often required to silence a warning reasonable.
I suggest we don't talk in the abstract. Once a specific set of warning options, together with -Werror is in place, you can raise your concerns about any particular warning emitted by any particular compiler, and hopefully, some per-warning-kind agreement can be reached. If we don't do anything at all because *some* warning in *some* library *might* require changes that are not acceptable to that library maintainer, we'll find ourself in the situation where a complete build of Boost produces a pile of warning, including "there's 99.9% chance your program will crash at runtime" warnings reported earlier. - Volodya