Re: [bug #16997] compiler warning for NSZone.m

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 4 Jul 2006, at 20:54, Patrick McFarland wrote:

> On Tuesday 04 July 2006 13:00, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > Hmm ... I started reclassifying these as category ';change request'
> > rather than 'bug' and severity 'wish' rather than 'normal' since
> > these are plainly not bugs, just (mostly) spurious compiler warnings.
> > However, I'm not sure that's the right thing to do ...
> > Should they be closed as 'invalid' instead?  I'm inclined to think it
> > would be nice to change code to avoid spurious compiler warnings as a
> > very low priority issue, but perhaps others feel different?
>
> Thats a bad idea because there very well could be an actual bug  
> there. GCC
> just doesn't randomly warn you. Its better to actually fix these,  
> then close
> them as invalid.

> Closing them as invalid, of course, would be marking them as not a  
> bug, which
> as I just said, there may actually be buggy code there. Its better to
> actually fix the code that causes the warnings then close them  
> thinking
> theres no bug.

Thanks ... you obviously went to quite some effort to generate all  
the bug reports, which is good ... but would it not have been better  
to determine whether there actually were any bugs first, and report  
any actual bugs found (better still, provide patches)?   Patches to  
avoid compiler warnings are also welcome ... but that needs to be  
done against the latest code in svn rather than an older release as  
it's definitely likely that the svn code will already have  
workarounds to avoid many compiler warnings especially any introduced  
by very recent compiler versions.

I don't want to close them as invalid, but it's difficult to see what  
to do with them ... compiler warnings aren't bugs, and are quite  
often spurious ... it's true that gcc doesn't issue warnings  
randomly, but that doesn't even remotely imply that where it issues a  
warning there is a bug.  Also, any developer can easily see the  
compiler warnings, so I'm not sure that having an entry in the bug  
tracking system (even as a change request) serves any purpose.

Apart from compiler warnings I see two issues ...

1. 'mv config.h ./config.h' on a flattened filesystem configuration  
produces a harmless warning message, but it would be nice if it  
didn't produce the warning.

2. you had a problem with gnutar ... presumably using a really really  
old version?  I suppose the configure script for the make package  
could check the version and abort with a message telling you to upgrade?