Don't use -Werror

Have you ever used multiple compilers? Try compiling the same thing written in C or C++ with: clang, then gcc, then icc and see how -Werror treats you within any remotely interesting code. It's hard to predict what one compiler feels is perfectly okay (or perhaps ambiguous) and another feels is downright wrong. It's downright infuriating in a cross-architecture environment. -Wall -Wpedantic and -Wextra are usually plenty.

> Enabling -Werror in distributions virtually guarantees that they won't build: Even if you took care of all compiler warnings in all compilers for which you enable this switch, it's just a question of time till a new compiler version comes along that has a new warning message and - BOOM.

This is a feature. This triggers a review of the new warnings introduced by the new compiler version, to see if they have found bugs, or should be squelched per false positive, or should be squelched project-wide.

> Two recent examples are squid and qemu-linaro, two packages I had to compile from source as Debian GNU/Linux didn't have (good enough, or any) packages for them.

The fundamental problem here is using a contributor's build environment (where I want -Werror to get them to contribute warning-induced bugfixes, or squelches/ignores if they're really false positives) for a non-contributor's task (where they just want the final binary, and aren't going to bother reporting the warnings even if I want them.)

Non-contributors building from source isn't a relevant niche to me (I generally ship binaries), but I can sympathize with the request for a warnings-as-warnings fast build path for them.

But make -Werror the default build path, for developers. This needs to be opt-out, not opt-in.

Go has something of an imposed rigidity that a lot of C programmers I think wouldn't tolerate well (culturally, viscerally),- one example: the whole comment out all unused variables because you commented out a function for debugging purposes during development (couldn't just pass a flag to the compiler, at least last time I used Go).

Aside - I seem to remember a Blog post you wrote on your experience with the Go language and I think it pretty accurately reflected a lot of my own experience with it.

edit: found it [0]

[0] http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/go_bloviations.html

GCC has pretty much always had `-Wno-YOUR_SPECIFIC_ERROR`.

By that, I mean it was present in a random version from 1993 (2.4.5). But it wasn't there in 1987 (1.35, the oldest version that can be easily downloaded), so it didn't literally always have it.

Edit: I wasn't satisfied not knowing; so I dug through some more versions. The -Wno- flags were introduced in GCC 2.0 (1992). (Though only tracked down 1.41, not 1.42, the last of the 1.X line).

I agree whole heartedly. When I'm programming I typically want most things that would cause a warning to stop me in my tracks. However I cannot count the number of times I've been trying to build someone else's code and the configuration uses -Werror and things that didn't raise a warning on their version of gcc or clang do on mine and now I've got to fix possibly dozens of not actual errors.