Last year there where two long threads about Boost Warning policy. If I'm not wrong nothing was concluded. I think that we can have two warning policies: one respect to the Boost users and one internal for Boost developement.
There was some progress towards fixing warnings: https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/WarningFixes Also I'm fairly sure that Paul Bristow started a "How to fix warnings" guidelines page, but I can't find it right now :-(
We can consider that Boost headers can be used by the users as system headers, so no warning is reported for these files. The main advantage I see is that it allows the users to don't mix the warnings comming from Boost and their own warnings.
Next follows a way to disable completly warnings for 3 compilers: Any Boost header file could be surrounded by
I'm completely against disabling warnings in such a blanket manner for a number of reasons: 1) It doesn't fix anything, it hides it. 2) I have found legitimate bugs in both my code and others as a result of fixing what looked to be "busy-body" warnings at first glance. Unfortunately, not all have been fixed: for example https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/ticket/3606 3) As others have noted, some warnings are only emitted when a template is instantiated with certain template arguments - in this case the warning may be telling the user something important about the template arguments that they're using and *should be seen*. 4) Blanket disabling does nothing for compilers that don't have such mechanisms - indeed I would contend that it would make things worse, as the trend would be towards "don't worry about warnings". 5) I worry that this would lead towards poorer quality code and an "out of sight out of mind" mentality. 6) As a last resort, we can always resort to - preferably selective - disabling methods when all else fails. So... yes we need to do something about warnings, and yes I would like to see our tests run with "warnings as errors" for some compilers at least, but please not like this! Anyhow, I'll jump down off my soap box now ;-) John