Re: warnings compiling Emacs 22 on amd64

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> We can probably remove those warnings with the right -Wno-foo
>>> invocation.
> No, that would mask out other possible cases when the warning is
> significant.

But since this warning is about something which is not itself a bug, either
gcc provides a way to annotate the code to indicate that this is not a bug
(like the use of double-parens to turn off the warning about assignment in
an `if'), or there's not much we can do about it (other than try to work
around it by making the code ugly, less robust, and maybe even less
efficient: after all the warning here is output specifically when gcc finds
an optimization).

Turning off such warnings is not such a big deal.  There are thousand more
such warnings that are currently "turned off" for the reason that either
they're too difficult to figure out or nobody has thought of writing
them yet.

The warning just says "hey, I've found a piece of code that's silly", but in
the case where that piece of code is the result of macro-expansion (or
function inlining, or other such code manipulation), it is often very much
normal and the result of good coding practices.  So I believe the problem is
with the warning which is not careful enough to see how that code
came about.


        Stefan