char / unsigned char [was: gnome-pim: Cannot open user-cal.vcf or GnomeCard.gcrd on PPC]
Jim Studt wrote:
> Fortunately some wise soul extended the ARM compiler to print a warning
> when a `char' is compared to a negative constant. We collect these during
> the builds and list them over at...
> http://www.federated.com/~jim/arm/charhell.html
> ... there are only about 150 packages left with this problem.
> There are still packages like gnome-pim that can't be detected by the
> compiler, but anytime a program hangs or fails to read a file this is
> the first thing to look for on the ARM port.
>
> I'll write a little script to blow all the compiler detected problems
> into the BTS. We'll see how many we can get cleaned up.
GCC also catches assignments and comparisons for wrong signedness. I have a
policy that all my code uses the "-Wall -Werror" gcc options. This should emit
all warnings and treats them as errors. It is my belief that this should be the
default for gcc. The tools give warnings for a reason and I think the user should
have to explicitly turn them off to ignore them. It would be nice if this was the
Debian policy (I have no idea if it is or isn't).
Brendan Simon.
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