Re: [PATCH] wt-status.c: disable those distracting -Wformat-zero-length warnings

On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 10:45:01AM -0500, Samuel Bronson wrote:

These warnings don't really seem to make much sense for this file.

Agreed, though the advice so far has been to put -Wno-format-zero-length
in your CFLAGS.

+/* We have good reasons for using zero-length format strings, and
+ * there's unfortunately no way to turn this off on a per-function
+ * basis ... */
+#pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "-Wformat-zero-length"

Are other compilers happy to ignore this pragma? I guess we could wrap
it in an #ifdef, if so.

It's also really not about this file in particular. The whole concept of
format-zero-length is questionable, as it ignores the concept that a
format function might actually do something useful with an empty format
(e.g., by adding boilerplate, or having a side-effect). It's just that
this file is the only one that happens to do so.

Annotating the _function_ to say "it's useful to pass an empty format
into this function" would make sense, but as you note, there is no way
to do that.

So I dunno. This seems like it does not quite specify what we want to
say as well as just "-Wno-format-zero-length", but it is more convenient
in practice (because we take care of it in the source code, rather than
relying on the user's build settings).

-Peff