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

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Sun, Apr 02, 2017 at 04:52:49PM +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> You seem to misunderstand what a continuous delivery/continuous
> integration pipeline is for.
<snip>

I think I understand what a CI server is for, I simply disagree with
you.

Let's compare two scenarios:

1) This warning: comparison between signed and unsigned integer.
2) A real build error due to a change in an underlying library.

For the sake of argument, 1) can be replaced by any warning that becomes
an error if -Werror is enabled. I.e. not a "real" build failure, by
default it's just a warning.

In most cases, if 1) appears, the problem is located in the code of the
module itself, it's not caused by a dependency. So the developer
directly sees it when building the module in jhbuild, even if the deps
are not up-to-date.

For 2), it's better that it is detected by a CI server so that we know
the problem as soon as possible.

A lot of GNOME modules have compilation warnings, and I don't consider
them critically important. In fact, -Werror is disabled in tarballs
(what we actually ship to distros). Of course it's better to fix them,
and in the modules that I maintain they are all fixed except deprecation
warnings. I won't push a commit on the master branch if it adds a
warning, because I directly see the warning when building the code
locally.

On the other hand it's nice that the CI server detects 2) because it's
not practical to rebuild the dependencies in jhbuild all the time.

--
Sébastien