Re: [boost] [warnings] Are warnings acceptable artifacts from builds?

Subject: Re: [boost] [warnings] Are warnings acceptable artifacts from builds?
From: Vladimir Prus (vladimir_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-09-09 02:11:05

Robert Ramey wrote:

> warnings vary with compilers. It's a huge amount of extra work
> to eliminate all warnings in all compilers.  And in many cases
> "fixing" warnings really amounts to "hiding" warnings (e.g.
> using a cast) so "fixing" them is worse than leaving them.

I think this is rather sloppy position, and the current pile of
warnings produced when building Boost clearly gives a negative
light to otherwise high-quality library.

Note all that eliminating all warnings in all compilers is not
required -- release tests are run with a few compilers, basically
msvc and gcc. Surely, promising no warnings for a compiler that is
not even tested would be too much, but promising no warnings for
the few officially supported compilers seems like reasonable approach.

- Volodya