Subject: Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2018 19:39:35 +0200

On Mon, Aug 06 2018, Jeff King wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 06:40:14PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>
>> Responding to the thread in general, perhaps people would like this more
>> if we turned DEVELOPER=1 DEVOPTS=no-error on by default?
>>
>> That's basically why I added it in 99f763baf5 ("Makefile: add a DEVOPTS
>> to suppress -Werror under DEVELOPER", 2018-04-14), because I wanted the
>> abilty to have verbose informative output without the build dying on
>> some older systems / compilers.
>>
>> It's fine and understandable if you're someone who's just building a
>> package on some older system if you get a bunch of compiler warnings,
>> but more annoying if you have to dig into how to disable a default
>> -Werror.
>
> I had the impression that DEVELOPER=1 was allowed to set flags that old
> versions might not even know about. Hence they might actually barf, even
> without -Werror. Maybe that's better since the introduction of the
> detect-compiler script, though.

I misrecalled that -Wimadethis-up wouldn't error on e.g. GCC today in
the interest of forward-compatibility, but it does. So that changes
things.

Although we could today pick some set of flags greater than what we use
today if there's interest, and enough compiler compatibility.

> I do think we may have a skewed view of the population on this list.
> We're developers ourselves, and we interact with new developers that we
> want to help.  But there are masses of people[1] building Git who are
> _not_ developers, and want the default to be as robust as possible.
> They're probably not going to show up in this thread.

Indeed.