Re: [PATCH] Makefile: suppress false positive warnings of empty format string.

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 11:38:33PM +0200, Stefan Beller wrote:

> > To be honest, I'm surprised that "-Wall" doesn't create problems for
> > older "cc" implementations. We've had patches for compiling with
> > antique SUNWspro and MIPSpro compilers, and I sort of assumed that those
> > don't handle "-Wall". But maybe they do. Or maybe people doing that just
> > set CFLAGS themselves.
> 
> Well actually I do think people are encouraged to play around with their
> CFLAGS as much as they like. I do add link time optimisation usually.

Oh, absolutely. I didn't mean to give the impression that you should not
tweak CFLAGS. That's what it's there for. I just meant that I do not
recall seeing complaints from people on such compilers, so either it
actually works, or they are savvy enough to tweak CFLAGS without making
a complaint. Or they no longer exist. The patches I'm thinking of were
from 2008, and the compilers and systems were old then.

> However I do have the strong opinion that any serious project should
> compile without any warning/error with the standard compilers of
> the current time. That's why I started an attempt again to have
> -Wno-format-zero-length in there by default. Most of the people (I
> assume so) are using gcc. So it should build fine there without any
> warnings.

Yeah, I'd agree it is a good goal.

> Sure it should build without errors as well on other architectures, so
> I do understand the issue to check if we're really using gcc and can
> omit this flag if using another compiler.

Right, agreed.

> and here
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/230806

Thanks, I didn't recall that one.

I still think if we are going to start doing gcc auto-detection in the
Makefile, it is slightly less ugly to just tweak the few callsites to
prevent the warning in the first place. I think gcc is being silly to
warn about, but it is the path of least resistance and maintenance.

-Peff