[PaulDavisThe1st]

-Werror can be hang up development at times, which is why we don't use it with Ardour. Sometimes, it can take a while to understand why some obscure message from the compiler is actually relevant and actionable, and that's not always the main focus while working on features or fixing a specific bug.

However, we do have a policy of expecting that all compiler errors (except those in in-tree 3rd party libs) should be fixed. We take a very negative view of any commits that create new compiler warnings. Essentially, we prefer to have a development culture that treats warnings as errors rather than have the compiler enforce warnings as errors.

When building Ardour, we this as a minimum:

'-Wall', '-Wpointer-arith', '-Wcast-qual', '-Wcast-align', '-Wno-unused-parameter'

but prefer to use this:

'-Wall', '-Wpointer-arith', '-Wcast-qual', '-Wcast-align', '-Wno-unused-parameter', '-Wcast-align', '-Wextra', '-Wwrite-strings', '-Wunsafe-loop-optimizations', '-Wlogical-op', '-Wnon-virtual-dtor', '-Woverloaded-virtual', '-fstrict-overflow'

[surajrmal]

For small teams that may work, but at some point, you need to protect yourself from tragedy of the commons. This is especially true during growth periods in the team or periods with significant churn. Culture can very easily shift and having something other than humans involved in ensuring good habits are held is worthwhile.