On Mon, Jan 01, 2018 at 06:31:37PM +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote: > In general we try to catch any compiler errors and build with pre-release > gcc versions. Please do report any you catch upstream. Thanks.
History shows that this trying is not working in practise. For example, it FTBFS with gcc-8 atm. Even if that checking was happening in practise, the release pace of elfutils is much too low to catch up with compilers. You are always going to loose on this whac-a-mole. Practically you are outsourcing that checking of new compilers to downstream users. When reported in the past, such issues were not fixed in a timely manner. Making builds fail on warnings hides fatal errors would that occur later. It makes us blind to the real problems and since it delays the finding of problems, it also makes them harder and more costly to track down. Please disable -Werror for downstreams such as Debian. -Werror is not worth the cost it incurs. A method that is way more effective at finding the problems you are after is setting up some CI service to use a variety of compilers with -Werror. Doing so is a good thing and with services such as travis-ci or even just jenkins.debian.net, the service is free as in beer at least. Helmut
