Re: -Werror

[Julio Merino <julio%meroh.net@localhost>]

On Sat, 13 Oct 2012 17:09:12 +0200
Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost> wrote:

> The removal of -Werror from packages is wrong - here's why:

While in an ideal world I could agree with most of your arguments, the
world is not ideal and -Werror causes more pain than not.  The problem
is the wide variety of compilers and their different versions: you
just cannot know which warnings will pop up regardless of how much you
test your builds before shipping a release.

I used to ship my own software with -Werror by default, and that was a
constant source of problems.  In the end, for pragmatic reasons, I
reverted that.  I still do all my development with -Werror and fix the
warnings as they arise on the different platforms I care about, but I
just don't want my users to suffer the same way because I just cannot
test all the possible system/compiler variants.

I'd even bet that most developers that put -Werror in their distfiles
don't know that their code will most likely raise warnings that their
particular compiler version did not spot.

So, IMHO, disabling -Werror in packages (the very few that carry the
flag) is fine.