------- Comment #6 from manu at gcc dot gnu dot org 2007-02-16 15:43 ------- (In reply to comment #5) > I agree with Manuel. One error should be one error, regardless of the number > of > lines it takes to print it. > > Two errors should be two errors, etc etc etc. > > Seems like a pretty simple rule to me. > > I find myself wishing for this rule more and more as metaprogramming becomes > more and more established in the C++ community. >
I think -Wfatal-errors=n is the wrong fix to a broader problem. I have read the thread started by Jim Wilson and I concluded two things: 1) People are annoyed by GCC spilling lots of error messages for a single error. So they want to use -Wfatal-errors. 2) Sometimes a single error message does not contain enough information to identify the source of the problem (see PR 15766). I think both issues should be reported as bugs always.[*] I have seen a lot of messages in forums and blogs complaining that GCC error messages are confusing or redundant or simply too many errors for a single issue. However, there are less than 20 PRs open for cases like these. I hope it is not because the PRs have been being closed systematically since the error messages are *true*. The messages can be completely *true* and conforming to the standards but that doesn't mean that they are *useful* (see PR 29062). Perhaps it sounds strange but a compiler can have usability issues. And GCC haves them. [*] Also, they are normally the kind of low-hanging fruit that could attract occassional contributors that don't have much free time to hack on a big project but are willing to dedicate two or three hours of a raining weekend to fix a PR like that. That is, like me ;-) -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20201
