On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 10:49:48AM -0700, Sam Hartman wrote: > Helmut> The problem here specifically arises, because we do not have > Helmut> consensus on -Werror being a bad idea in release builds. > I agree with your reading of consensus and for that reason support > registering an option to say do not use -Werror. Sorry if I've missed it in this thread, but who is this option supposed to be *for*? Generally speaking, DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS or DEB_BUILD_MAINT_OPTIONS flags are useful for permuting the output of dpkg-buildflags, when the default output of that command is unsuitable for a particular package or for a particular rebuild environment. But here, the output of dpkg-buildflags is not incorrect because it emits neither -Werror nor -Wno-error; we are talking about an interface to override upstream defaults, not Debian defaults. If this is for the maintainer, it seems an unnecessary indirection to define a flag for the maintainer to set, to configure dpkg-buildflags, to output the correct flag that you know you want to pass to your package's build system. (Maybe the reasoning here is that it's a simpler interface for maintainers that abstracts a lot of the reasoning about build systems and makes for a more compact expression in debian/rules? I'm not sure.) If this is for people doing out-of-archive builds who don't want to deal with failures from -Werror, I can see how having a single environment toggle is useful to them; but it doesn't seem useful to *Debian* when such out-of-archive rebuilds don't correspond to the official builds. E.g. if they're test builds for new toolchains, knowing that the package *could* build, with options Debian doesn't actually use, is of limited use. (If you build twice, once with once without and file bugs on packages where the results differ, I guess that's one use, but involves a lot of manual labor.) My understanding is that the argument here is that -Werror is not a sensible option to use for production builds, that it should only be used for upstream test builds. I'm not convinced this is true; I know we've more than once caught programming errors of various severities downstream by building on ports that upstreams would generally not be in a position to cover in their developer test builds. But if that's the argument, then I think the logical desired policy outcome would be for dpkg-buildflags to be changed to emit -Wno-error *by default*, with an option flag along the lines of DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=Werror that lets you turn it on instead. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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