Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?

Subject: Re: [boost] Official warnings policy?
From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-11-05 07:33:13

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 4:36 AM, John Maddock <john_at_[hidden]> 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.
>
> No disagreement from me.
>
> Some stats might help:
>
> Boost-1.41 pre-beta on ubutunu-9.1 with gcc-4.4.1 produces an 11 Mb log file
> from the build, with 133 THOUSAND LINES of output.
>
> And that's just from building the binaries - so a tiny subset of Boost - I
> dread to think what a full test build would reveal.
>
> In fact the more I think about this, the more I feel that we should fix as
> much of this as we can for 1.41.

I agree.

One possible approach would be to create a wiki page that describes:

* A first cut at a Boost policy on warnings.

* For the current release of the critical compilers, what compiler
switches apply. "Critical compilers" are GCC, VC++, for now.

* How a developer using bjam can run local tests with those switches.

* A list of libraries known to have serious warning issues.

Anything else will take too much time to be useful for 1.41.0.

Would anyone like to take a cut at starting such a wiki page?
Volunteer(s) needed.

--Beman