Re: Anonymous types and [basic.link] for nonlocal variables

[Mike Stump <mrs at apple dot com>]

On Tuesday, March 9, 2004, at 02:47 PM, Joe Buck wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 02:29:43PM -0800, Matt Austern wrote:
> > Among other things, this patch enforces the rule that variables with
> > linkage may not be defined in terms of names with no linkage.

> > This is one of those annoying problems where in one sense this is
> > clearly a correct change: it brings us into closer conformance with 
> > the
> > language standard that we claim to implement.  On the other hand, it
> > breaks the QT build.  I bet QT isn't alone.
>
> In my view, anything that breaks QT is a regression, no matter how
> many standards documents we can point to as justification.  Certainly
> -pedantic should object to such usage, and perhaps future QT versions
> should avoid such usage if possible, but we need to build QT.

QT is just one build package.  gcc regularly breaks tens of them in a 
typical OS build.  :-)  I don't see much advantage in having a compiler 
that supports one specific package over the others.

Having said that, this is what pedwarn and/or permissive are for.  The 
original patch had pedwarns in it, so I'm wondering how exactly things 
broke.  Does QT use -Werror?  If so, they should not in released 
versions.  In development versions, it seems fine to use -Werror, but 
we should not worry about breaking dev builds.