Re: [PATCH] Build system improvement

[Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>]

On Sun, 2009-04-12 at 18:07 -0700, David Miller wrote:
> From: Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>
> Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2009 17:24:49 -0400
> 
> > On Sat, 2009-04-11 at 08:29 -0700, Colin D Bennett wrote:
> > 
> >> If we could build with -Werror, then it wouldn't be so hard to find the 
> >> warnings since the build would abort...
> > 
> > It's also possible to redirect stderr to a file so that the build
> > doesn't stumble on the first warning.
> 
> I'm iffy about this.

I meant that "warning hunters" can use it and have a choice what
warnings to fix.  I didn't suggest stderr redirection to be part of the
build system.

> There are some hard warnings to get rid of.
> 
> For example when building certain grub-* tools there is no way
> to get around the current redefinitions we get of LONG_MAX and
> friends.  (one comes in via grub headers, then the stdio.h include
> gets us the system definition, we can't use ifdef guards because
> the grub headers come in and define things first)

I would explore the possibility of introducing GRUB_LONG_MAX.  GRUB
already duplicates a lot of libc definitions.

Sure enough, forcing developers to keep the code warning-free could lead
to ugly fixes that are worse that the original warnings.  However,
keeping the build system quiet will help more people notice the
warnings.  Somebody will come with a nice fix eventually.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin