On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 05:04:07PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes: > > > What I didn't notice immediately was that gcc was emitting some > > warnings, but that the -Werror option was not honored for those > > warnings. Investigating turned up #615157 (Cc'd): the gcc maintainers > > have decided to disable -Werror for some new warnings, because otherwise > > it would cause FTBFS bugs in packages that have -Werror set in their > > debian/rules file. > > > IMHO, this is the wrong way to handle such things. > > I was a bit dubious about it as well, for the reasons you state, but > please note that GCC 4.6 introduced a major new warning about set but > unused variables and, so far, every large or medium C code base that I > have has had at least once instance of that warning. And I'm usually > pretty picky about such things. Indeed; my own code runs into it as well. This is precisely why I'm unhappy about it; when I write code, I want the compiler to complain, loudly, when I do something dubious. When I build packages, I don't; instead, I then want the compiler to just compile. The difference should be in the CFLAGS that I pass it along, not in its defaults. > If -Werror had not been disabled for this warning, my guess is that nearly > every package using -Wall -Werror not previously tested with 4.6 would > FTBFS. Yes, and I think we should allow that to happen. If a maintainer chooses to let their package fail because a new compiler version introduces new warnings, then we should not be second-guessing their reasons like this. I don't think it's smart for maintainers to use -Werror in their packages; but if they, after having informed themselves, choose to so anyway, then disabling warnings 'because it will make packages fail' is counter-productive. It's not like -Werror is the default. > I don't like seeing us modify upstream compiler behavior in Debian this > way, but I can understand not wanting to introduce what could have easily > been hundreds of failures. (The problem, of course, is that those > failures are still latent, and unless we're going to keep this going > forward, we have cleanup to do so that we can go back to tracking > GCC's normal behavior.) I'm not saying I don't understand the rationale; I do. But I don't agree with it; I don't think it's the right thing to do. -- The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by the following formula: pi zz a
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