Re: -Werror

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 06:48:10PM +0200, John Marino wrote:
 > Don't forget that others disagree that Werror should be present in
 > release software.

I learned a long time ago not to ship with -Werror enabled,
particularly if you have more than minimal other warning flags
enabled, because a lot of loonix installs had/have system headers that
aren't clean of warnings. So then the build breaks and people with no
clue spread around nonsense like "that foo program, it doesn't even
compile", which can be very destructive.

That said, pkgsrc is not quite in the same position. I see no reason
(other than the manpower required) that all packages shouldn't be
expected to build cleanly, and patched when they don't. However,
because that does take a lot of manpower, sometimes it is good enough
to do the expedient thing; as I said elsewhere, disabling -Werror as a
temporary measure seems fine, provided that there's reason to believe
that the warnings appearing are harmless. (If there are too many to
wade through, that's all by itself not harmless.)

There's no point in "successfully" compiling a package that doesn't
work.

 > Well, one of my main criticisms of pkgsrc is low quality packages.

Yes, you keep saying that, and nobody agrees with you or appears to
understand your metric of quality.

As far as I can tell, lang/pnet should in fact be removed, and now
will be in due course. You've not been able to make a convincing
argument (so far at least) that the other stuff you cite is so bad
that it should be deleted.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost