Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> (2013-09-30): > I use -Werror for Automake for all of the packages for which I'm upstream > and have not noticed it being a serious issue, although maybe I'm missing > something? But I didn't have any trouble regenerating the files for my > various packages with Automake 1.14. That's nice for well maintained packages. Not so nice when packages start FTBFSing in the middle of a transition because of an automake update, and maintainers are otherwise busy or MIA. > -Werror for a compiler is a bad idea for Debian packages because, unless > you do extensive portability testing, it's quite likely that there will be > warnings on some platform on which the code is not regularly tested but > which aren't serious issues. Also, each new version of the compiler comes > with a ton of new warnings, most of which are not significant. No doubt. > Automake, by comparison, runs the same on every host, so if you've fixed > the warnings on your local system, they're fixed everywhere. And it has > considerably fewer warnings, and far fewer that are introduced in each new > version. Meaning one needs to get a fix once; a random NMUer might need to chase upstream patches (never a pleasure when fixing unrelated issues). Given what you wrote, I'm not sure what it buys us to keep -Werror in distribution packages, except for the possibly ticking time bomb. Mraw, KiBi.
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