[FFmpeg-devel] some thoughts on the website and warnings

[Calvin Walton]

On Sat, 2015-09-19 at 12:36 -0400, Ganesh Ajjanagadde wrote:
> Regarding the large array of platforms, as can be seen from the
> patches I have submitted over the past few weeks, one long term goal
> I
> have is getting to a "nearly -Werror" state at least on the most
> recent clang/gcc. Already notice that most warnings are from older
> compilers, non clang/gcc, windows, etc, which in many cases give us
> nothing (since newer ones anyway warn for the good ones).
> Nevertheless, these are occasionally useful.
> 
> Latest clang/gcc are on the order of 100 warnings, and I think with
> some more work, this can be brought down to 10 (for the most annoying
> ones). If this happens, it should help us in treating warnings on
> latest clang/gcc more seriously than before. Among these two, I have
> been far more impressed with clang than gcc.
> 
> This might stir the flames, but who knows: maybe in a year we can
> seriously consider -Werror for a certain set of "core platforms"
> (which can be voted upon; recall the leadership committee etc). By a
> "platform" I mean a complete environment: set of configure flags,
> compiler flags, compiler versions, etc.

As someone who has done some distro packaging and occasionally tries to
get old packages compiling on newer systems, I just have a note to
this:

Please never enable "-Werror" by default in a release version of a
package - where that's defined as whatever version you recommend
arbitrary users pick up.

There's nothing worse than having some piece of software that's worked
for ages fail to compile just because the system you're building it on
now happens to produce an (often trivial) warning that wasn't seen on
the developer's system.

Thanks.

-- 
Calvin Walton <calvin.walton at kepstin.ca>