On 09/05/2023 21:04, Eli Zaretskii via Gcc wrote:
From: Jonathan Wakely <jwakely....@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 9 May 2023 18:15:59 +0100
Cc: Arsen Arsenović <ar...@aarsen.me>, gcc@gcc.gnu.org
On Tue, 9 May 2023 at 17:56, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
No one has yet explained why a warning about this is not enough, and
why it must be made an error. Florian's initial post doesn't explain
that, and none of the followups did, although questions about whether
a warning is not already sufficient were asked.
That's a simple question, and unless answered with valid arguments,
the proposal cannot make sense to me, at least.
People ignore warnings. That's why the problems have gone unfixed for
so many years, and will continue to go unfixed if invalid code keeps
compiling.
People who ignore warnings will use options that disable these new
errors, exactly as they disable warnings. So we will end up not
reaching the goal, but instead harming those who are well aware of the
warnings.
My experience is that many of the people who ignore warnings are not
particularly good developers, and not particularly good at
self-improvement. They know how to ignore warnings - the attitude is
"if it really was a problem, the compiler would have given an error
message, not a mere warning". They don't know how to disable error
messages, and won't bother to find out. So they will, in fact, be a lot
more likely to fix their code.
IOW, if we are targeting people for whom warnings are not enough, then
we have already lost the battle. Discipline cannot be forced by
technological means, because people will always work around.
Agreed. But if we can make it harder for them to release bad code,
that's good overall.
Ideally, I'd like the compiler to email such people's managers with a
request that they be sent on programming courses!
