Re: Reintroducing critical warnings?

[Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org>]

Havoc Pennington <hp <at> pobox.com> writes:

> Wait, that's the whole point is to crash the app 
> 
> The issue is that if it just prints stuff, people don't fix the bug
> (in part, perhaps, because nothing goes through bug-buddy). Maybe the
> fix is to bug-buddy the warning, but don't crash the app. Not sure how
> hard that would be to code.
> 
I guess this is the age-old question of "How should we treat a non-critical bug
during development?"
And I guess it is equivalent to "Should we enable gcc's -Werror switch for svn
builds?" which is the question I regularly clash about with Behdad.

In the end it's a tradeoff. A tradeoff between forcing users to make you care
about potentially harmless stuff that's not "a real bug" (to quote Behdad) and
missing real bugs because users don't care about bugs that don't bite them. It's
also a tradeoff between allowing you to be lazy and not fix warnings immediately
- or at least until the next gcc comes around that makes them real bugs - and
having to fix obscure warnings on weird platforms immediately because they break
the build or prevent the application from running.

I'm all for making warnings fatal and compiling with -Werror in svn builds. But
you'll have a hard time convincing other people.

Cheers,
Benjamin