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I think this depends on a bunch of stuff. - Who are the consumers of the source code, i.e. who will ever check it out and build it? Sometimes, it's just one pe

I think this depends on a bunch of stuff. - Who are the consumers of the source code, i.e. who will ever check it out and build it? Sometimes, it's just one person. Sometimes, it's a team of engineers. In that case, -W -Werror is fine. - How does a warning being reported make the engineers on the team feel? If the answer is, "Hold my beer for five minutes while I commit a fix", then -W -Werror might be the right call. I've been on projects like that and some of them had nontrivial source code consumers. - How easy is it to hack the build system? Some projects have wonderfully laid out build systems. If that's the case and -W -Werror is the default, then it's not hard to go in there and change the default, if the -Werror creates problems. - Does the project have a facility (in the build system) and policy (as a matter of process) to just simply add -Wno-blah-blah as the immediate fix for any new warning that arises? I've seen that, too. (I'm using -Werror in some parts of a personal project. If you're a solo maintainer of a codebase that can be built that way, then it's worth it - IMO much lower cognitive load to never have non-error warnings. The choice of what to do when the compiler complains is a more straightforward choice.)

account42 3y ago
I don't really see the point of -Werror for projects where I am the only developer because I can just fix warnings before committing but things like errring on unused variables are counterprodutctive when you are just trying something out in your local checkout. In my opinion the only place -Werror makes sense is in CI - and there you can just as well have the CI fail on warnings so you get all of them in the output and not just miss out later ones that were never produced because the build was aborted due to -Werror. CI also allows more nuanced approaches like not allowing new warnings of some types while you still deal with fixing existing ones.

account42 3y ago

I don't really see the point of -Werror for projects where I am the only developer because I can just fix warnings before committing but things like errring on unused variables are counterprodutctive when you are just trying something out in your local checkout. In my opinion the only place -Werror makes sense is in CI - and there you can just as well have the CI fail on warnings so you get all of them in the output and not just miss out later ones that were never produced because the build was aborted due to -Werror. CI also allows more nuanced approaches like not allowing new warnings of some types while you still deal with fixing existing ones.