On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 01:40 PM, jerry@... wrote:

Absolutely. I always ran gcc in "pedantic". Any bug that the warnings find - is a freebee.

This is a very good idea for the development phase, but be careful in the production phase.

I was contributing to a Google open source project. One of the Google developers, for software religious reasons decided that the -Wall complier needed to be set. But, the developers were one compiler revision behind from what people setting up a fresh development environment were using.?

The next push to Github and dozens or more of company projects that incorporated this Google project crashed to the ground. This release did have some other important enhancements and bug fixes that users were waiting for.?

The -Wall switch turned a new compiler warning about something that wasn't previously caught, but considered bad practice, to be turned into a hard error, so the code would no longer compile.

This warning, while a good idea to invest some time to correct on the development side had zero adverse effect on the code people were running in their production environments.

Anyway I published a fast way to get back running, a SED script that found the hardcoded (yes they hardcoded the new switch in) -Wall switches in Google's home grown build system. This fixed the problem and people were back in business while the Google developer who did this, dug-in and fiercely defended how correct he was to do this.?

The fact that people needed their systems to continue to work now, did not seem to be relevant to him.

Also most of the users were "Data Scientist" with some systems skills, so this fix was more actionable and simple than more hard core experimenting with mixing and matching compilers and code releases, for them.?

Tom, wb6b