On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 12:40:25PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Ramsay Jones <ramsay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > [I have fixed my config.mak file now, so I don't see the warning
> > anymore! Having -Wno-format-zero-length in DEVELOPER_CFLAGS, or
> > not, is a separate matter.]
>
> I suspect that 658df95a4a ("add DEVELOPER makefile knob to check for
> acknowledged warnings", 2016-02-25) took it from me (namely, Make
> script in my 'todo' branch). In turn, I added it to my set of flags
> in order to squelch this exact warning, so...
For anybody interested in the history, we started using this when
status_printf() got the format attribute. Relevant patch and discussion:
http://public-inbox.org/git/20130710002328.GC19423@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/T/#u
We went with disabling the warning because it really is wrong. It makes
an assumption that calling a format function with an empty string
doesn't do anything, but that's only true of the stock printf functions.
Our custom functions _do_ have a side effect in this case.
The other options are to have a special function for "print a warning
(or status) line with no content". Or to teach those functions to handle
newlines specially. We've often discussed that you should be able to do:
warning("foo\nbar");
and have it print:
warning: foo
warning: bar
That's useful in itself, and would probably make cases like this easier
to handle, too. But it's a pretty big change. Another option would be to
just teach formatting functions to handle a single "\n" as a synonym for
the empty string (or even detect trailing newlines and avoid appending
our own in that case). That would mean you could do:
warning("\n");
to print a blank line. That's arguably more obvious about the intent to
a reader (I say arguably because the new behavior _is_ subtle if you
happen to know that warning() usually appends a newline).
Anyway. Those are all options, but I don't think there is any problem
with sticking with warning("") for now. It is not the first part of the
code that tickles the format-zero-length warning.
-Peff