Hi All, I turned on the aggressive warnings by default following my warnings purge. I can disable this, but doing so would allow users to post code with warnings without realising it, then I or others have to go and guess at what the appropriate warning fix would be which is the danger of introducing bugs can come in. Fixing warnings as you develop code highly preferable as it allows the person with the most knowledge about the code to avoid ambiguities as they write it, learning how to write cleaner code in the process.
My hesitancy over upping warning levels is that most warnings don't directly map to bugs, and changing code to avoid warnings can involve jumping through some rather odd coding strategies where the code actually becomes less readable, less maintainable and more prone to introducing bugs. If you don't really understand what the warning relates to, and what the code that producing the warning is trying to do then there is a real risk of unintentional breaking once working code. "If it ain't broke don't fix it" is a good phrase to keep in mind when thinking about fixing warnings. In my role as maintainer I get to see the full life cycle of code, including warning fixes that fix bugs, and ones that introduce bugs, I include my own attempts at warning fixes as well as others. The most experienced engineers tend to have a better hit rate with fixing more bugs than introducing new ones as they will be better at reading the actual intention of the algorithm and it's caveats, but I've haven't yet seen any engineer make no mistakes... One can only strive for perfection, no one can achieve it. In this instance the Windows build is now broken due to aggressive warnings.... so the double edge sword of warnings has raised it's ugly head in a different aspect, the code was actually in pretty good shape but now won't compile at all for some without changing the build system. Clearly this big step backwards and isn't viable, so we'll need to pull back on the warnings levels under Windows, the suggestion of /W3 seems a reasonable compromise so I've just change the VS aggressive warning CmakeLists.txt script path to use this. An svn update will get this change. Could VS users please do an svn update and see how the build now fares? Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
