Re: [PATCH] Makefile: enable DEVELOPER by default

On Mon, Aug 06 2018, Jeff King wrote:

On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 06:40:14PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

quoted

Responding to the thread in general, perhaps people would like this more
if we turned DEVELOPER=1 DEVOPTS=no-error on by default?

That's basically why I added it in 99f763baf5 ("Makefile: add a DEVOPTS
to suppress -Werror under DEVELOPER", 2018-04-14), because I wanted the
abilty to have verbose informative output without the build dying on
some older systems / compilers.

It's fine and understandable if you're someone who's just building a
package on some older system if you get a bunch of compiler warnings,
but more annoying if you have to dig into how to disable a default
-Werror.

I had the impression that DEVELOPER=1 was allowed to set flags that old
versions might not even know about. Hence they might actually barf, even
without -Werror. Maybe that's better since the introduction of the
detect-compiler script, though.

I misrecalled that -Wimadethis-up wouldn't error on e.g. GCC today in
the interest of forward-compatibility, but it does. So that changes
things.

Although we could today pick some set of flags greater than what we use
today if there's interest, and enough compiler compatibility.

I do think we may have a skewed view of the population on this list.
We're developers ourselves, and we interact with new developers that we
want to help.  But there are masses of people[1] building Git who are
_not_ developers, and want the default to be as robust as possible.
They're probably not going to show up in this thread.

Indeed.