-Werror pain persists as Linus Torvalds issues Linux 5.15rc2

Linus Torvalds has revealed that winding back the decision to default to -Werror – and therefore make all warnings into errors – has made for another messy week of work on the Linux kernel. "So I've spent a fair amount of this week trying to sort out all the odd warnings, and I want to particularly thank Guenter Roeck for his …

[Anonymous Coward]

OCD

I too like a build output to be perfectly tidy, no disturbances in the geometric arrangement of characters as they stream past on the console. Getting all the source code file names to be the same length matters a lot too, in the interests of ultimate tidyness. Link messages make me wince, because.

Yet, I like the logs produced by the code I write to be indented according to the call stack depth from main(). I like the ebb and flow of the indentation, as the code runs, like waves rushing up the beach, and then washing back out again. Recursive calls look like a Tsunami - it just keeps coming! Run away, run away!

Er, do I need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Er, do I need help?

"Getting all the source code file names to be the same length matters a lot too"

Well, you certainly need to rethink your priorities. Source file name length should be "long enough to clearly label the contents of the file".

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Er, do I need help?

I put the content in the filename, then all the files are 0 bytes.

That way I save on storage

[Mike 16]

Content in the file name

IIRC (but it was a long time ago) some variant of some Cray OS stored sufficiently short files directly in the inode (or non-ix equivalent). So, prior art, sorta.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Er, do I need help?

Now that would a sneaky way of getting functionality past code review. The source code looks fine, pity the build is taking input from the filenames of the source code! Especially if the filenames are a ROT13 scrambling of the code that gets built.

There's bound to be a gcc option for this.

[Martin Howe]

Intel tried to kill it and it still won't die

"Who knew I'd still worry about some odd EISA driver on alpha, after all these years?"

Thanks for doing so, Mr Torvalds, I do like to play Doom on my 1997 AlphaServer now and then - just for old time's sake :) Gets a bit hard if it can't see the SCSI controllers :)

[ComputerSays_noAbsolutelyNo]

House-cleaning exercise

Even if they do not enable -Werror by default. They could do so every other release as a house-cleaning exercise.

Like at home: you clean most of the time superficially, yet sometimes you are motivated and rearrange the living room such that you can clean underneath the couch and other large furniture.

I'll get my cleaning coat

[GreyWolf]

Re: House-cleaning exercise

Last time we moved the sofa, we found a live mouse underneath it.

Hilarity ensued.

[Missing Semicolon]

ssl?

Was it the ssl code that the Debian folks 'fixed' to remove all warnings, which then became insecure because it was using illegal buffer overrun reads on stack variables as a source of entropy?

[m4r35n357]

Re: ssl?

Did you read the article?

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: ssl?

Sort of - I think it was valgrind rather than the compiler which generated the errors. If you're doing something out of the ordinary like that you should have a comment to say why.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: ssl?

That was what they said happened. If you read the OpenSSL code itself though, you'll see that entropy is mostly read from /dev/random or CryptGenRandom, as you'd expect. So who knows...

[_LC_]

When the problems are of a more "fundamental" nature

I can guess what most “fixes” are going to look like:

(turn-off-problem) problematic-code

Which then in turn enables you to throw a horseshoe at the code without getting a whimper, thus aggravating things:

horseshoe => problematic-code => all okay!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one reason Linus is still so respected

He caused the pain by insisting on -Werror, and he's pitching in to fix code rejected by it, instead of just expecting everyone else to pick up the slack.