Re: Using -Werror in CFLAGS for a debian package build
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.
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.
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.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: