Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2018, 17:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20180806171119.GC120433@aiede.svl.corp.google.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180806170211.GD19053@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Hi,

Jeff King wrote:

> 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.

Yes.

[...]

Show 11 quoted lines

> 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.

Relatedly, we need to think about the incentives these defaults create. Personally, I want *more* naive users to be building from source, because then they are better able to test recent versions, bisect, test my patches, etc.

As I hinted in my earlier reply, I think it would be best to try some basic things to make DEVELOPER more visible first. If that fails, then we can revisit how to make this more drastic change in a way that minimizes the harm (and I am not sure yet that that is possible).

Thanks, Jonathan