Tommy Vercetti wrote:
On Saturday 17 September 2005 17:45, you wrote:
That's a real misunderstanding. There are many warnings that are very
specialized, and if -Wall really turned on all warnings, it would be
essentially useless. The idea behind -Wall is that it represents a
comprehensive set of warnings that most/many programmers can live
with. To turn on all warnings would be the usability faux pas.
Ok, sure. This option is also used by many developers to see all possible
problems in their code. And btw, signed/unsigned isn't a minor problem.
Majority of code giving such warning is exploitable (in the black-hackish
terms).
I am developer myself, but just using gcc, hence my user's opinion.
But since you don't read the documentation, you really don't know what
warnings are available. If -Wall turned on all warnings, nearly all
users would find far too many false positives. Sure everyone wants
to see "all possible problems in their code", but warnings that generate
too many false positives obscure the very problems you are looking for.
It is fine to argue for a specific warning being included in -Wall,
though before you do this, you should check for discussions as to
why it was not included, and run some tests over large bodies of
code to get a feel for the issue of false positives. However,
arguing that a warning should be included because TV has looked
up the definition of "all" in a dictionary but has not read the
gcc documentation is unlikely to be persuasive.
Regarding cc,s it is in practice impractical to expect people to
go to the trouble of removing you from the cc list. Instead set
up your mailer to delete duplicate messages, or, if you don't know
how to do that, get some help in doing so.
