Do not use -Werror by default in your modules without joining #testable

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi all;

I know that the effort to use -Werror by default is well-intentioned,
and ordinarily I'm in favour of maintainers catching errors locally
before pushing code to the public repository.

In practice, though, this effort has been insufficient, when not
misguided. In order to appeal to newcomers, and to avoid pain to new
contributors, jhbuild builds with --disable-Werror; again, entirely in
favour of this approach. The rationale given for this was that we
would catch errors through the Continuous pipeline — especially when
these errors are caused by modules early in the dependency chain.

This, by and large, has *not* happened. Maintainers do not realise
things break when they build locally, and since they do not keep an
eye on the Continuous build, they are completely unaware of breakage
further down the line.

Yes, I know: this would be slightly more easier if Continuous warned
about build breakages via email (though I'm pretty sure email would
still be a high latency medium that tends to be ignored);
nevertheless, joining the #testable IRC channel *today* to get a
notification of build failure is *not* a heavy burden — especially now
that we have the Matrix bridge and you don't even need an IRC client
running at all times.

If you decide to automatically enable -Werror in your modules by
following this wiki page:

  https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeCommon/Migration

Then, *please*: keep an eye on the Continuous build by joining the
#testable IRC channel on irc.gnome.org. The channel only contains
build messages (and the occasional discussion/rant about CD/CI), so
you don't even need to keep a close eye on it. Just ensure you notice
if your module builds correctly; I will typically ping you, just in
case.

Please, ensure that we can keep GNOME building correctly for everyone
at all times.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]