Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?

Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-05 07:05:46

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Patrick Horgan <phorgan1_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>...
>   An example of one of my least favorite avoidable warnings is when one part
>   of boost moves an include file and deprecates the old location, and release
>   after release, I have to look at warnings from other parts of boost.  I
>   can't even say what I think about that.  I don't think a release should go
>   out with issues like that.  Boost should at least be internally consistent,
>   and not have warnings about misusing other parts of boost.  You'd think that
>   would be the bare minimum to avoid looking like amateurs.  How hard would it
>   have been to fix for example, in 1.40 when I see hundreds of warnings from
>   the graph stuff because:
>   boost/property_map.hpp:15:4: warning: #warning "This header is deprecated.
>   Please use: boost/property_map/property_map.hpp"
>   I'm guessing the graph guys are used to ignoring warnings.  But the code was
>   released like this.  That's embarrassing.  There's probably 35 places they
>   would have had to fix this so that hundreds of errors wouldn't spew out
>   whenever someone used their code.  They aren't even willing to grab the
>   low-hanging fruit.
>   There have long been other places where boost code used deprecated headers
>   from the standard libraries.  That's unprofessional.
>   Sorry to rant.  This is a long standing issue for me and I thought I better
>   write this before I saw the inevitable responses from people trying to
>   justify their bad coding.  I really would have ranted then!

The result of this long discussion may well be a Boost policy on
warnings. But it the meantime, you might want to open tickets against
against libraries that are using long deprecated headers.

--Beman