Re: [PATCH] Avoid one "parameter unused" warnings.

[Paul Eggert]

Michal Privoznik wrote:

> it's not a false positive either

It depends on what we're looking for. I'm looking for bugs. To take an extreme 
example, if GCC warned about every character string literal containing an 
unescaped ASCII apostrophe, on the grounds that the apostrophe could be a typo 
and program quality would be improved by requiring programmers to manually check 
and explicitly escape every string-literal apostrophe, I'd disable such a 
warning first thing. Any benefits of the warning would not be worth the hassle.

The warning we're talking about is not as bad as this hypothetical example. But 
it's pretty bad. I'd rather not contort good code to pacify it.

> Try running 'make syntax-check' which fails because of gnulib's
> copyright_check.

This sounds like a different and unrelated problem.

> BTW: the patch of yours don't help really. Firstly, unused-parameter
> sneaks back in (through -Wextra I assume). And secondly, in libvirt we
> want to use Wunused-parameter and we do mark unused parameters
> explicitly (see ATTRIBUTE_UNUSED macro).

In that case, I suggest doing what coreutils and other programs do: use a 
different set of warnings for Gnulib code than for the libvirt code. You can 
specify -Wno-unused-parameter just for Gnulib; this will override -Wextra.