Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?

Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Emil Dotchevski (emildotchevski_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-04 20:50:34

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Patrick Horgan <phorgan1_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.
>
>   It not only doesn't look good.  It isn't good.  As Herb Sutter and Andrei
>   Alexandrescu point out in Item 1 in C++ Coding Standards which says compile
>   cleanly at high warning levels, if you get used to ignoring warnings, it is
>   guaranteed to bite you in the butt.  I know people will talk about silly
>   examples, and how hard it is. Wah wah wah.  I find real errors in the code
>   of people like that all the time.  They got used to ignoring warnings and
>   real problems got by them.  Someone who isn't willing to understand the
>   warnings is asking for trouble, and I know there are people in boost who
>   don't take the trouble to understand their warnings.  I see things that are
>   silly, and that they should have fixed.  I don't see how they can hold their
>   heads up for some of this stuff.

It isn't helpful to cast the blame generically like that. I don't know
how you know that Boost developers don't take the trouble to
understand their warnings, but a good start would be to file a
specific bug report whenever you suspect that a warning is being
erroneously ignored.

>   Of course, there are silly warnings.  Sometimes the problem is with the
>   compiler.  But still, make them go away if at all possible, otherwise the
>   noise makes it difficult/impossible to catch the real problems, and all that
>   noise makes you look like a rookie wanna be, not the provider of serious
>   software.

Should I understand that your code compiles on MSVC without disabling
C4996? It tends to generate a lot of noise even at low warning levels.

Emil Dotchevski
Reverge Studios, Inc.
http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode