On Mon, Aug 06, 2018 at 06:40:14PM +0200, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> Responding to the thread in general, perhaps people would like this more
> if we turned DEVELOPER=1 DEVOPTS=no-error on by default?
>
> That's basically why I added it in 99f763baf5 ("Makefile: add a DEVOPTS
> to suppress -Werror under DEVELOPER", 2018-04-14), because I wanted the
> abilty to have verbose informative output without the build dying on
> some older systems / compilers.
>
> It's fine and understandable if you're someone who's just building a
> package on some older system if you get a bunch of compiler warnings,
> but more annoying if you have to dig into how to disable a default
> -Werror.
I had the impression that DEVELOPER=1 was allowed to set flags that old
versions might not even know about. Hence they might actually barf, even
without -Werror. Maybe that's better since the introduction of the
detect-compiler script, though.
I do think we may have a skewed view of the population on this list.
We're developers ourselves, and we interact with new developers that we
want to help. But there are masses of people[1] building Git who are
_not_ developers, and want the default to be as robust as possible.
They're probably not going to show up in this thread.
-Peff
[1] I actually wonder how large that mass is. Clearly there are many
orders of magnitude more users than there are developers. But I have
no idea what percentage of them build from source versus using
somebody else's binary package.
