On 05/02/2008, Eric Niebler <eric@boost-consulting.com> wrote:

Robert Dailey wrote:

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On Feb 5, 2008 3:11 PM, Eric Niebler <eric@boost-consulting.com> wrote:

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I'm against Boost globally disabling any warnings. IMO, it's really the user's call.

I believe boost should keep itself clean, whether that means fixing warnings properly or hiding them via #pragma directives. It's my responsibility to hide my own warnings in my own source files, not in boosts. That's just my opinion on the subject of warnings.

An organization may have a policy to disallow use of "unsafe" constructs that could lead to unchecked buffer overflows. They would want actually want to know if Boost headers were using raw pointers as output iterators, for instance. If Boost disables these warnings for its own code, it presents a barrier to adoption for these organizations.

If Boost adopts a policy whereby noisy warnings are disabled for Boost code, there should at least be a well-documented method for re-enabling these warnings for the people who care about them. The concern is that, since nobody reads the docs, and since the lack of warnings actually hides the issue, it could lead to a false sense of security. It seems like the wrong default to me.

The attached patch attempts to globally silence these warnings unless --show-all-warnings is passed on the command line. It should only work for the main boost build process and for user builds that explicitly use a library's build/Jamfile.v2 and bjam. Also, there's a warning emitted that explains what's happening. I'm sure there are better ways of doing this, but the patch is really simple and seems to work as expected. It's there if anyone finds it useful. Cheers, Darren P.S. I've not got access to MSVC8.0 and I seem to remember there being three defines you needed to supply but I can't remember what they all were.