On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 04:53:00AM -0400, Scott Kostyshak wrote: > I have been thinking about compiler warnings because of the recent > discussion here: > http://www.mail-archive.com/lyx-devel@lists.lyx.org/msg175099.html > > >From that thread, I have the understanding that some developers think > it's important to fix warnings, although not if it is risky. I don't > have much experience programming so I wouldn't be surprised if there's > something wrong with the following logic: > > It seems to me that warnings should either be fixed when they occur or > just ignored. That is, if a warning is viewed to be a problem, it > should be fixed right when it's introduced. Or, if it is not viewed as > a problem, it should just be permanently ignored. I don't see any > advantage to having warnings sit around. > > Thus, I wonder if it would be useful to specify "-Werror" in the > development build, which would turn all warnings into errors and would > alert the author to fix them right away.
And as soon as the next version of a compiler decides to spit out more warnings (and we know that not all warnings are warranted) the code base suddenly does not compile anymore, for no good reason, and people will have to spend time to reconfigure or patch around the problem, when all they want is just to get a fresh build. There's nothing wrong with keeping a -Werror enabling patch locally, git makes this extremely easy. But it's nothing that should be on by default. Andre'
