Re: RFC: More C errors by default in GCC 14 (no more implicit function declarations etc.)
Hi!
On Tue, 2023-04-18 at 17:54:20 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2023-04-18T16:07:45+0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > TL;DR: I want to propose a GCC 14 change which will impact
> > distributions, so I'd like to gather some feedback from Debian.
> > I would appreciate some discussion on the Debian impact. As Debian
> > generally doesn't do mass rebuilds and we have upstreamed the fixes,
> > maybe the impact is somewhat reduced? Given that you'll get the fixes
> > as part of the rebases. Of course, other mass-changes might trigger
> > rebuilds at a larger scale. I guess it also depends on when you want
> > to update to GCC 14. The later, the more likely other packages have
> > already imported the upstream fixes. The alternative would be to
> > apply the fixes in a proactive manner, like we are trying to in
> > Fedora.
>
> Debian has little fear of sweeping transitions, but it does like them to
> be precisely defined in scope, and easily measured in adoption. The
> addition of a versioned contour flag to "DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS" or
> similar[3] is straightforward to measure by scanning source packages.
At the time I got aware of this effort, I implemented a dpkg-buildflags
feature (qa=+c99) to enable most of these flags (see [F]), but didn't
mention it because it was not clear whether this was a desired
direction and the current implementation seemed slightly restrictive,
also due to the freeze.
But perhaps switching more gradually does indeed work better, at least
in the Debian context. I think the feature name is not great, because it
is not very descriptive and precisely because once used it could not be
currently extended, and that ties with work I've been doing to version
feature flags (but I guess this one could always be introduced and be
considered v0 or similar, probably with a better name(?)).
Thanks,
Guillem
[F] https://git.hadrons.org/git/debian/dpkg/dpkg.git/commit/?h=next/modern-c&id=3316845bf415436299d61501db655fd2c1813436
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