Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?

Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Vladimir Prus (vladimir_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-04 15:12:07

Emil Dotchevski wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:24 AM, Vladimir Prus <vladimir_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> John Maddock wrote:
>>
>>> I'm *not* saying we should do this for 1.41, but should we have an official
>>> policy regarding compiler warnings and which ones we regard as "failures"?
>>>
>>> I realize these can get pretty busy-body at times, but if the user sees
>>> several pages of warnings when building Boost it doesn't look so good. Â So
>>> my suggestion would be that we have two test-runners (if we have any spare!)
>>> that build with warnings-as-errors, maybe:
>>>
>>> -Wall -pedantic -Wstrict-aliasing -fstrict-aliasing -Werror
>>
>> I would remove -pedantic, but otherwise, it's a very good idea.
> 
> This is the problem: *you* would remove -pedantic, but others want it.

I would be happy about having -pedantic there, if there's demand. But
my guess that putting it there now will result in every single test
being a failure.

>> Unfortunately,
>> recent discussion left me with the impression that few folks care.
> 
> It is not about caring, once again the argument is about a personal
> preference: is the ugliness and decreased readability that is often
> required to silence a warning reasonable.

I suggest we don't talk in the abstract. Once a specific set of warning
options, together with -Werror is in place, you can raise your concerns
about any particular warning emitted by any particular compiler, and hopefully,
some per-warning-kind agreement can be reached.

If we don't do anything at all because *some* warning in *some* library 
*might* require changes that are not acceptable to that library maintainer, we'll
find ourself in the situation where a complete build of Boost produces
a pile of warning, including "there's 99.9% chance your program will crash at runtime"
warnings reported earlier.

- Volodya