Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Prevent compiler warnings by using "stop on warnings"/"treat

From: Stephen Fisher <stephentfisher@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:01:20 -0700
On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 03:04:49AM +0100, Ulf Lamping wrote:

> In my experience having a compiler warning free code is a good way to 
> prevent very subtle bugs and would also be a good addition to the 
> programs security - and BTW more pleasant to work with ;-)

Indeed.

> So here comes the buildbot into the scene. If we would use a compiler 
> option like "stop on warnings" (or "treat warnings as errors" or 
> alike), it would become at least much more obvious if new warnings 
> were added - the buildbot will get "red". This will also make the time 
> when a warning is noticed much nearer to the time the code was 
> added/changed - currently fixing a warning once added is often done 
> much later than it was introduced (making the fix unnecessarily 
> difficult).

> An incremental way to introduce this could be:

Good ideas!

> As usual, this is my "Win32 point of view". I'm pretty sure the above 
> is possible to do for the Win32 platform. I'm not sure if it's 
> possible with the automake foo for the different unix/linux platform 
> builds ...

With automake, we just need to put AM_CFLAGS = -Werror in the 
Makefile.am file in each directory that we're working on.

> So what's the opinion about this way to improve the Wireshark code 
> base? Are we willing to produce only warning free code and fixing 
> warnings that appear on the buildbot?

Yes.

> While I would take a look on the Win32 warnings, are the unix/linux 
> developers willing to spend some time to remove warnings that don't 
> appear on Win32 (or would this be a "Win32 only" show)?

I'm willing to work on the Unix warnings.


Steve