Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

From: Stefan Beller <sbeller@google.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2018, 18:38 UTC
Message-ID: <CAGZ79kYzPYg=MXdWij-voDwNg52srXZOACgK5OOKrquekU-5eg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20180806170211.GD19053@sigill.intra.peff.net>

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> 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.

Good point about the skewed perception of people who compile Git themselves.

At first I thought this could be mitigated by detecting if someone is a developer by being more clever, for example if they have a commit (at HEAD) that is not contained in any remote, it is a pretty good indicator that fresh code was written. But this could also be the case for some non mainstream platform, that needs fixing.

But then I entertained the thought that we actually do not care about people committing non conforming code to their copy of git.git, but actually only care about the code when we see it (i.e. upon review).

So I wonder if we want to "fork" git-send-email and provide a tool to send emails with a pre-send compile&lint check specific to our code base.

But then all these sound a lot more complicated than a simple knob that we turn on and off. So I don't look any further into it.

Stefan