Re: [PATCH] Tidy up 'make' output

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:22:43AM +0200, Stefan Reinauer wrote:
> I would not consider this "hiding information". The information you see
> (CFLAGS for example) don't really change across the lines and there's
> always the chance to say V=1 to see all the compiler lines. The
> opposite: The current forest of duplicate information is really what is
> hiding the relevant information between a lot of uninteresting fuzz.
> Maybe, you guys would prefer to set V=1 as the default, so one would
> have to say V=0 to get above output? I am currently only compiling grub
> with make -s, because that is the only way to get any decently parsable
> output for finding issues in the code.

Yeah you have a point here.

> Please, please, don't use -Werror.  GRUB2 is currently hard enough to
> build and the build system is less than optimal and elegant. While I
> agree that clean code never throughs warnings, the amazing number of
> different gccs and build environments out there would make developing
> for grub2 and compiling it very hard. There are quite a number of
> warnings that do not matter because the developers simply know better
> than the compiler. -Werror will lead to ugly workarounds to suppress
> these warnings and make adoption of new tool chain versions a task from
> hell.

The problem with GRUB is that even a minor error can easily become critical
if it prevents you from booting.  Often -Werror can mean extra work just to
shut up a warning (although I wouldn't consider this a workaround, unless
there's some example I'm missing), but sometimes it can catch bugs that turn
out to be really hard to debug, like those involving memory corruption.

I think in the long run it would pay off.

-- 
Robert Millan

<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What good is a phone call… if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)