The meaning of -Wall

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Sat, 3 May 2003, Bruce Korb wrote:

> is in the eye of the beholder.  Therefore, it seems like it is a
> reasonable thing to make it configurable.  :-)  When -Wall
> gets specified, a project specific, user specific and site
> specific directory can be searched for warnings to be added to
> or removed from the default set built into the compiler.  The
> *BSD folks can ensure that such a file would contain
> --no-warn-unused-whatevers.  Make it simple and easy to understand
> how to configure the thing for Joe Average User.  Likely not 3.3,
> but 3.4 doesn't sound too far fetched.

The tool Joe Average User wants is "make"; they can easily set

CFLAGS = `if [ -f ~/.gcc-opts ]; then cat ~/.gcc-opts; fi; if [ -f \
  /etc/gcc-opts ]; then cat /etc/gcc-opts; fi`

in their Makefile if they want to.  Adding such functionality to GCC - so
adding another variable piece of the environment making reproducing bug
reports more difficult - is not the way to go.  The options used in *BSD
source trees are centrally configurable.  It's up to wherever the user is
learning about Unix as a whole from to teach them the culture that any
nontrivial project has a Makefile with compilation options centrally
configured.

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