Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH v2 1/5] Remove hardcoded strict -Werror checking

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 29/12/2016 17:10, George Dunlap wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 5:07 PM, Andrew Cooper
> <andrew.cooper3@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 27/12/16 15:53, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>>>> "Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx> 12/27/16 4:42 PM >>>
>>>>>> Alistair Francis <alistair.francis@xxxxxxxxxx> 12/22/16 8:14 PM >>>
>>>>> Everyone seems fairly open to an override. Is a environment variable,
>>>>> which if set will disable Werror acceptable? Something like NO_ERROR=Y
>>>>> which will result in no -Werror being appended.
>>>> I dislike environment variables for such purposes, and would prefer
>>>> requiring
>>>> such to be added as make options. If it was an environment variable, it
>>>> should start with XEN_. And its name should fully reflect the purpose,
>>>> i.e. I
>>>> shouldn't have to guess what kinds of errors would be suppressed. Perhaps
>>>> WARN_NO_ERROR?
>>> That said, I'm not sure everyone agreed on putting an override in place. I
>>> think
>>> Andrew had made it quite clear that there is a reason for -Werror to be in
>>> use,
>>> and we shouldn't encourage people weakening code by tolerating warnings
>>> (even if for the purpose of upstream integration no warnings will be
>>> permitted
>>> anyway, due to -Werror remaining the default).
>>
>> For development, -Werror should remain the default.
>>
>> For downstream integration, an ability to override -Werror is useful for
>> distros, especially in cases of using a newer compiler than the code was
>> ever developed against.
>>
>> However, it should definitely be the case that a positive choice needs to be
>> taken to disable -Werror, which should hopefully make people thing twice
>> about doing so.
> Wouldn't it make more sense to disable -Werror for the release?

-1.  This is not a sensible suggestion IMO.

The reason for switching off debugging for a release is because there is
a runtime overhead of the debugging, and we don't provide security
support in case the ASSERT()s are a little too aggressive.

The reason behind using -Werror doesn't change at the point of a
release.  A warning on a release branch is just as important to fix as a
warning on master.

~Andrew

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