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

[Ronald S. Bultje]

Hi Calvin,

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 9:35 PM, Calvin Walton <calvin.walton at kepstin.ca>
wrote:

> 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.


I don't think anyone is suggesting adding -Werror to releases, it sounds
like it's just for developer builds.

As for the suggestion itself, the work itself is great (thanks Ganesh!),
the suggestion of -Werror for developer builds on latest (whitelisted)
clang/gcc releases sounds appealing.

Ronald