Yes, but what about when it's purposely pre-initialized to some value,
   rather than assigned a random value "just to shut the compiler up"?

there are times when this is true -- when -Wuninitialized
_does_ find a bug. but that doesn't excuse it's use with
-Werror when it is infact impossible for the variable to be
used uninitialized, and gcc happens to get that bit wrong...

until gcc is `fixed' (this may not be at _all_ simple), it
(-Wuninitialised) should probably not be used by default.

.mrg.