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

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-05-06 02:24:01

David Abrahams wrote:

> 
> on Sat May 05 2007, "Jonathan Franklin" <franklin.jonathan-AT-gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> AFAICT gcc will only gripe if the base class defines virtual methods but
>> no
>> virtual dtor.  Perhaps this isn't the case with older versions of the
>> compiler.
>>
>> I still need to read up on the issues WRT is_polymorphic, since they
>> obviously exist given David's previous statements.
> 
> Oh, maybe not.  I don't remember the precise issue.  However, it's
> easy to imagine that that particular warning could have been defined
> differently.  My point is that most warnings aren't hard errors for a
> reason: there are legitimate use cases for the code being warned
> about.

As a practical matter, if your code has 100 false warnings, there's no chance
you'll notice 101-th warning that's result of real bug. Therefore, you either
eliminate all warnings, enable -Werror and investigate all new warnings that
occur, or you don't use warnings at all. I prefer -Werror, and therefore if
Boost headers produce zillion of warnings, that's rather bad.

Now, it might be impractical to expect anybody to spend day workarounding 
an obscure warning on a compiler nobody uses, but all warning patches I saw
posted are rather simple, so maybe there's no hard-to-workaround warnings
at all. 

- Volodya