RE: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

> To: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
> Cc: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>; Duy Nguyen
> <pclouds@gmail.com>; Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>; Stefan
> Beller <sbeller@google.com>; Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>; git-
> packagers@googlegroups.com; Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@google.com>
> Subject: Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default
> 
> 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 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.
> 
> -Peff
> 
> [1] I actually wonder how large that mass is. Clearly there are many
>     orders of magnitude more users than there are developers. But I have
>     no idea what percentage of them build from source versus using
>     somebody else's binary package.