Re: c/3190: Re: gcc bug: complaint on %c for strftime

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28 at cam dot ac dot uk>]

On Tue, 26 Nov 2002, Neil Booth wrote:

> Might I suggest that these comments won't be forthcoming, seeing as
> we've waited this long, and we blow this warning away?  Otherwise we just
> deadlock, which is also the case on similar issues, which is not good when
> a better solution than the existing one is available.

(a) If the issue comes up and annoys people they're more likely to
comment.  Perhaps in a few decades' time if nothing is done before then
people will study this as the then oldest open bug.  Except where
regressions from >= 2.95 bugs don't come with a timescale; they're merely
something that may be worth fixing eventually, whether within a day, a
year or many years.

(b) I'll predict now that if GCC and C-based languages with strftime are
still in use in the 2090s, people then will be cursing anyone who now
removes Y2K (and Y2.1K) warnings for -Wall, assisting in proliferation of
bad code, unless by then there have been major improvements through other
methods in the ability to write correct code.  I consider it unfortunate
that WG14 failed to take the opportunity of DR#217 to fix the Y10K problem
in the C standard.

(c) A simple conservative change would be to move -Wformat-y2k out of
-Wformat (into -Wformat=2 alongside -Wformat-nonliteral and
-Wformat-security; -Wformat-security being another option I think would
fit the definition of -Wall).  But see (b) about people in 90 years' time
cursing such a change.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk