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 02:49:13

Emil Dotchevski wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 11:13 PM, Vladimir Prus<vladimir_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> Emil Dotchevski wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Christopher
>>> Currie<christopher_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Emil Dotchevski<emildotchevski_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>>>> I think that you assume that the warning is reasonable and easy to
>>>>> fix, as with most warnings that could be silenced with casts. A lot of
>>>>> times, fixing such warnings is common sense. In that case, just a note
>>>>> to the library developer would be enough to have it fixed.
>>>>>
>>>>> But you can't generalize from this, to "all warnings should be silenced."
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, many people work in environments where there is a
>>>> local policy that warnings will be treated as errors. If library code
>>>> emits warnings, the build breaks and the library is unusable.
>>>
>>> I agree this is a very strong argument, and you're right that even
>>> though such policy is unreasonable, it may render a library basically
>>> unusable.
>>
>> Why is such policy unreasonable?
> 
> I think you misunderstood my point. What I called unreasonable in the
> text you're quoting is environments (e.g. companies people use Boost
> at) where there is a requirement to treat warnings as errors.

Well, because there's no other reasonable way to make new warnings in code
to be noticed and examined, I think that warnings-as-errors is actually
a reasonable requirement.
 
> So I was agreeing that the existence of such
> environments--unreasonable as they are--is a strong argument for
> zero-warning policy in Boost.

This conclusion I do agree with.

- Volodya