Re: somebody dropped a (warning) bomb

Linus Torvalds
2007-02-15T19:03:07Z

On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Sergei Organov wrote:
>
> I agree that if the warning has no true positives, it sucks. The problem
> is that somehow I doubt it has none. And the reasons for the doubt are:

Why do you harp on "no true positives"?

That's a pointless thing. You can make *any* warning have "true
positives". My personal favorite is the unconditional warning:

warning: user is an idiot

and I _guarantee_ you that it has a lot of true positives.

It's the "no false negatives" angle you should look at.

THAT is what matters. The reason we don't see a lot of warnings about
idiot users is not that people don't do stupid things, but that
*sometimes* they actually don't do something stupid.

Yeah, I know, it's far-fetched, but still.

In other words, you're barking up *exactly* the wrong tree. You're looking
at it the wrong way around.

Think of it this way: in science, a theory is proven to be bad by a single
undeniable fact just showing that it's wrong.

The same is largely true of a warning. If the warning sometimes happens
for code that is perfectly fine, the warning is bad.

Linus