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

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2018 18:40:14 +0200

On Sat, Aug 04 2018, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> Duy Nguyen <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> On Sat, Aug 4, 2018 at 8:11 AM Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>> My main concern is not about them but about other
>>> people building from source in order to run (instead of to develop)
>>> Git, and by extension, the people they go to for help when it doesn't
>>> work.  I have lots of bitter experience of -Werror being a support
>>> headache and leading to bad workarounds when someone upgrades their
>>> compiler and the build starts failing due to a new warning it has
>>> introduced.
>>
>> Even old compilers can also throw some silly, false positive warnings
>> (which now turn into errors) because they are not as smart as new
>> ones.
>
> I agree with both of the above.  I do not think the pros-and-cons
> are in favor of forcing the developer bit to everybody, even though
> I am sympathetic to the desire to see people throw fewer bad changes
> that waste review bandwidth by not compiling or passing its own
> tests at us.

I agree.

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.