Re: [PATCH] Makefile: suppress false positive warnings of empty format string.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Sep 30, 2013, 23:23 UTC
Message-ID: <20130930232349.GB23218@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <5249EF59.4080607@googlemail.com>

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 11:38:33PM +0200, Stefan Beller wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> > To be honest, I'm surprised that "-Wall" doesn't create problems for
> > older "cc" implementations. We've had patches for compiling with
> > antique SUNWspro and MIPSpro compilers, and I sort of assumed that those
> > don't handle "-Wall". But maybe they do. Or maybe people doing that just
> > set CFLAGS themselves.
> 
> Well actually I do think people are encouraged to play around with their
> CFLAGS as much as they like. I do add link time optimisation usually.

Oh, absolutely. I didn't mean to give the impression that you should not tweak CFLAGS. That's what it's there for. I just meant that I do not recall seeing complaints from people on such compilers, so either it actually works, or they are savvy enough to tweak CFLAGS without making a complaint. Or they no longer exist. The patches I'm thinking of were from 2008, and the compilers and systems were old then.

Show 6 quoted lines

> However I do have the strong opinion that any serious project should
> compile without any warning/error with the standard compilers of
> the current time. That's why I started an attempt again to have
> -Wno-format-zero-length in there by default. Most of the people (I
> assume so) are using gcc. So it should build fine there without any
> warnings.

Yeah, I'd agree it is a good goal.

> Sure it should build without errors as well on other architectures, so
> I do understand the issue to check if we're really using gcc and can
> omit this flag if using another compiler.

Right, agreed.

> and here
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/230806

Thanks, I didn't recall that one.

I still think if we are going to start doing gcc auto-detection in the Makefile, it is slightly less ugly to just tweak the few callsites to prevent the warning in the first place. I think gcc is being silly to warn about, but it is the path of least resistance and maintenance.

-Peff