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

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Sun, 2017-04-02 at 14:59 +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> 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.

So with Epiphany the desired behavior is:

 * Developers (by default, anyone using a git checkout) get -Werror
 * Users (by default, anyone using a tarball or JHBuild) don't

I like it, but it's not perfect because in practice all developers use
JHBuild, and all my attempts to re-enable Werror from jhbuildrc have
failed. So I think the only people getting -Werror by default are
people who actually don't want it.

Simplest solution would be for Continuous to just pass --disable-Werror 
to configure. OTOH I'm willing to change the Epiphany behavior if you
don't agree, but it's baked into use of AX_IS_RELEASE([git-directory])
and AX_COMPILER_FLAGS, which to my understanding is the recommended set
of macros to use for GNOME modules. So we need to adjust that if we
want to change this. The behavior you want would require using
AX_IS_RELEASE([always]), which doesn't seem great to me. I think that's
the only way to get the behavior you want without totally dropping use
of AX_COMPILER_FLAGS, which we probably don't want to do. (Am I
mistaken?)

Michael