Hi -devel, I was working on nbd-server upstream, and so had ran ./configure with CFLAGS='-Wall -Werror', which I consider good practice when writing C code. 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. First and foremost, I do not believe that setting -Werror in a debian/rules file is the best way to maintain a package; -Werror is a development option which should not be used in a release build (which a Debian package is). When a package sets -Werror in its debian/rules file, it *will* FTBFS when the default compiler is changed, while not necessarily breaking the package itself. I don't think it adds value. That's a personal opinion, however, and we don't have a policy on this; so if a maintainer is willing to deal with the fallout of their packages failing to build when the default compiler is changed, that should probably be their problem. So long as they are ready to receive FTBFS bugs and fix them in a timely manner, oh well. It might still be an annoyance for a user who wants to build a package on a different compiler than what happens to be the default one, but it's not a fatal problem. And I can see how using -Werror *might* increase the quality of a package; some warnings are emitted on only some architectures, so having -Werror *could* ensure that architecture-specific bugs are eliminated before they potentially become a problem. It's not totally silly, but it still seems a bit excessive. At any rate, all that is undermined if gcc does not turn all warnings into errors; if a maintainer uses -Werror in a package, that means they *want* their package to FTBFS on warnings. Reducing the effect of -Werror would not seem to help these maintainers; presumably they want the warnings to be fixed in their source anyway, because eventually this breakage of -Werror will be reverted, and then their packages will FTBFS again. And while it's a very bad idea to introduce RC bugs in your reverse dependencies when we're near or in a freeze, I was under the impression that we're not currently in such a time, which would suggest that doing so would be acceptable currently. Additionally, reducing the effect of -Werror in that manner has an effect on those who use Debian sid as a development environment; put otherwise, the Debian default compiler is used for more than just Debian packages, and I don't think we should be mucking with it in this manner. Thoughts? -- 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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