Re: AM_MAINTAINER_MODE_DEFINES

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 03:21, Christopher James Lahey wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 23:41, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> > I'm not sure the ENABLE_WERROR is the right way to do things. We already
> > have the GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS macro to enable people to set this kind
> > of stuff -- although if you only want it in maintainer mode you have to
> > do your own testing. Some modules do this by testing if they are
> > building from CVS or the macro version number if odd or whatever; it's
> > not clear that this is something best triggered by maintainer mode.
> > Adding another way to do the same thing (I assume people are meant to
> > include @ENABLE_WERROR@ in Makefile.am where appropriate, right?) just
> > provides a loaded gun with foot-autoseek enabled. Now you have to
> > remember not to use GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS if you use
> > AM_MAINTAINER_MODE_DEFINES otherwise all sorts of interesting confusion
> > will result.
> 
> So, the thing is that GNOME_COMPILE_WARNINGS is to allow the person
> compiling to set the warning level.  Unfortunately, at least in the
> past, some projects put -Werror in by hand.  My goal here was to allow
> people who want to put -Werror in a way to do so without breaking
> releases.

The problem I see is that the -Werror issue is orthogonal to the
*_DISABLE_DEPRECATED macros issue. I am ambivalent about the latter
issue (although I can appreciate that you are trying to unbreak the
build tree as fast as possible).

Given that we encourage people to build from CVS regularly, it is even a
bit unfriendly having -Werror forced on for CVS builds. In development
models where a small group of maintainers are the only people working
from CVS, you can standardise on which version(s) of which C compiler
and other tools to use and turn on -Werror and be happy. For GNOME, it
is harder than this and, ultimately, probably not worth it. I know some
packages do turn on -Werror by force in CVS but we shouldn't necessarily
be making it easy for those people to screw up the build for others.

[...]
> > So my preference would be to see ENABLE_WERROR backed out. And could you
> > namespace the macro a bit better? Maybe GNOME_MAINTAINER_MODE_DEFINES or
> > something so that looking at it it is clear it has nothing to do with
> > the Automake maintainers' default action for maintainer mode.
> 
> Yeah someone else pointed out the namespacing thing too.  Sorry about
> that.  Both of these changes committed.

Thanks. :-)

Cheers,
Malcolm