Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Aug 6, 2018, 17:02 UTC
Message-ID: <20180806170211.GD19053@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <87zhxzsb2p.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 06:40:14PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 12 quoted lines

> 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.