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by Hizonner 190 days ago
Why does your codebase generate hundreds of warnings, given that every time one initially appeared, you should have stamped it out (or specifically marked that one warning to be ignored)? Start with one line of code that doesn't generate a warning. Add a second line of code that doesn't generate a warning...
3 comments
michaelt 190 days ago
> Why does your codebase generate hundreds of warnings

Well, it wasn't my codebase yesterday, because I didn't work here.

Today I do. When I build, I get reports of "pkg_resources is deprecated as an API" and "Tesla T4 does not support bfloat16 compilation natively" and "warning: skip creation of /usr/share/man/man1/open.1.gz because associated file /usr/share/man/man1/xdg-open.1.gz (of link group open) doesn't exist" and "datetime.utcnow() is deprecated and scheduled for removal in a future version"

The person onboarding me tells me those warnings are because of "dependencies" and that I should ignore them.

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hiq 190 days ago
It's rare that I work on a project I myself started. If I start working on an existing codebase, the warnings might be there already. Then what do I do?

I'm also referring to all the warnings you might get if you use an existing library. If the requirements entail that I use this library, should I just silence them all?

But I'm guessing you might be talking about more specific warnings. Yes I do fix lints specific to my new code before I commit it, but a lot of warnings might still be logged at runtime, and I may have no control over them.

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Hizonner 190 days ago
> If I start working on an existing codebase, the warnings might be there already. Then what do I do?

What would you do if the code you inherited crashed all the time?

Come up with a strategy for fixing them steadily until they're gone.

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hiq 189 days ago
If this code crashed all the time there'd be a business need to fix it and I could justify spending time on this.

But that's not what we're discussing here, we're discussing warnings that have been ignored in the past, and all of a sudden I'm supposed to take the political risk to fix them all somehow, even though there's no new crash, no new information.

I don't know how much freedom you have at your job; but I definitely can't just go to my manager and say: "I'm spending the next few weeks working on warnings nobody else cared about but that for some reason I care about".

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stackskipton 190 days ago
Because most people are working at Failure/Feature factories where they might work on something and at last minute, they find out something is now warning. If they work on fixing it, the PM will screaming about time slippage and be like "I want you to work on X, not Y which can wait".

2 Years later, you have hundreds of warning.

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Hizonner 190 days ago
You found that out at the last minute. So then you did a release. It's no longer the last minute. Now what's your excuse for the next release?

If your management won't resource your project to the point where you can assure that the software is correct, you might want to see if you can find the free time to look for another job. You'll have to do that anyway when they either tank the company, or lay you off next time they feel they need to cut more costs.

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