Re: [boost] [1.34.0beta] many, many warnings... :(

From: David Abrahams (dave_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-02 13:47:59

on Wed May 02 2007, "Sohail Somani" <s.somani-AT-fincad.com> wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: boost-bounces_at_[hidden] 
>> [mailto:boost-bounces_at_[hidden]] On Behalf Of Vladimir Prus
>> Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2007 8:07 AM
>> To: boost_at_[hidden]
>> Subject: Re: [boost] [1.34.0beta] many, many warnings... :(
>> 
>> Marc Mutz wrote:
>> 
>> > I for one think that this is
>> > a serious issue, and I encourage you to accept such patches (not for
>> > 1.34.0, obviously, but 1.34.1) and make it a release goal 
>> for 1.35 (or
>> > 1.34.1) to reduce the number of warnings to a decent level. 
>> Maybe change
>> > the regression tests to highlight any kind of compiler 
>> diagnostics in
>> > <pick your favorite color>.
>> 
>> The problem is that the current regression reporting tools don't count
>> warnings (previous version use to), so there's nothing 
>> nagging developers
>> about warnings introduced in their code.
>
> If you treat warnings as errors and if bjam has an option to "keep
> going" as much as possible, then you get builds as far as they can go
> (i.e. all the warnings) and builds fail if there are warnings. Then I
> think you don't need to depend on the regression reporting tools for the
> rest of time, atleast for this stuff.

It would take a lot to convince me to require that Boost builds with
all warnings enabled and treated as errors.  There are just too many
"nuisance" warnings out there, and since GCC gives us no way to
explicitly suppress warnings in code, we'd have to write convoluted
(and sometimes even inefficient) code just to silence them.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
Boost Consulting
http://www.boost-consulting.com
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