On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 1:17 AM, Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org wrote:
A compile failure is a serious bug, and we should do everything possible to avoid them.
Agreed, to an extent. A user who is trying to compile with a really whacky toolchain (say, a C compiler on an Amiga, a mainframe, or a wristwatch) should expect some errors, and we should not try to avoid those if they reflect real problems that need to be solved before wine can run properly.
And I also feel pretty strongly that compiler warnings have some value, and we should pay attention to them. Right now we're plugging our ears and going "la la la la la I can't hear you", and that seems a bit careless. As Wine aims for higher and higher quality levels, eventually we will have to change our ways here.
Making -Werror the default is the worse thing we could do in that respect.
If we do it in the right way, it could end up increasing our code quality quite a bit without inconveniencing any users.
The right way is to slowly fix all the warnings -- like Andrew Talbot is doing -- and slowly encourage all wine developers to crank up their warning levels to the max. Once we've voluntarily cleared out nearly all the warnings, we can then have a flag day to clean out all the rest, and switch -Werror on. That will keep errors from creeping back in.