Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?

Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Steven Watanabe (watanabesj_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-04 21:34:31

AMDG

Patrick Horgan 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 would certainly be a good thing if Boost compiled without warnings.
However, I do not think that fixing all warnings would significantly reduce
the number of bugs.  Realistically, the vast majority of the warnings that
we have to deal with are spurious.  I am not convinced that tracing through
all the noise from a dozen different compilers is worth the effort from that
standpoint.  As far as I am concerned, the primary reason for eliminating
warnings is that they are annoying to users.

In Christ,
Steven Watanabe