Re: [Grep-devel] [platform-testers] new snapshot available: grep-2.25.101-be82

[Jim Meyering]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 9:43 AM, Assaf Gordon <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello Paul and all,
>
> On 09/27/2016 11:59 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>>
>> On 09/27/2016 08:09 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>>
>>> Would you please adjust it not to use
>>> configure's--enable-gcc-warnings option?
>>
>>
>> He didn't use the --enable-gcc-warnings option; warnings were enabled
>> automatically because he built from a Git checkout[...] I installed the
>> attached patch to try
>> to fend off reports like this in the future.
>
>
> Few minor thoughts/questions regarding this patch:
> (I assume similar patches will propagate to other projects as well)
>
> 1.
> gcc-6.2 is rather new (released about a month ago).
>
> Would it be possible to consider some older GCC's as still valid
> for automatically enabling warnings ?

Hi Assaf,

Actually, we may have to consider not just the compiler version, but
also the C library. In the past, I have had to tell people not to
enable those warnings unless they were using the latest version of
Fedora. But perhaps the list of systems that interest people are now
mostly warning  clean. We'll see.

> These are the versions for some stable versions distributions:
>   CentOS 7:     gcc 4.8
>   Ubuntu 16.04: gcc 5.4
>   Debian 8:     gcc 4.9
>   fedora 23:    gcc 5.1
>   fedora 24:    gcc 6.1
>
> Effectively this means that developers using stable distributions will
> need to build and install a new compiler, or forgo the warnings (which are
> very useful).

Or let them turn the warnings on themselves by invoking configure with
--enable-gcc-warnings. We're just talking about the default.
That typically filters out the noise of "this broke, and I'll just
report it" rather than "this broke, and here's a proposed fix".

> 2.
> This check will disable warnings when not using GCC (e.g. clang).
> Of course clnag brings its own host of warning-related issues,
> but with this patch warnings will never be automatically enabled for clang
> developers when using git.