[xroche]

-Werror is debatable. On a controlled build environment (with fixed GCC version and fixed distribution), I am convinced this is the way to go. After careful reviews, -Wno-xxx switches can be added on demand (such as -Wno-overlength-strings, haha) to limit annoying/irrelevant messages, but experience shows that having thousands of warnings in logs lead to ignore issues (this is especially true when the codebase is huge)

[tenfingers]

Except one case (gcc 2.9x), I stopped using a fixed version of a compiler a long time ago, nowdays I only use a fixed build host when needed. -Wall -Wextra -Werror will magically make your build fail because of a new warning which wasn't caught before, or a system library update, or others.

In my mind it's way better to just build your software with -Wall/others and implicitly review all warnings before pushing changed files to a common repository (which is kind of obvious, since when you are developing you also are looking the build logs).

For instance, -Wunused-args is helpful, but for a provisional API that's going to stay in the repository for a couple of weeks the warning is useless. Some people would go on and add useless code to silence the warning, though I will just commit the code.

I never had in my career large projects with more than a handful of warnings anyway. The kind of person that would use -Werror, in reality would go perfectly fine without.

[plorkyeran]

> The kind of person that would use -Werror, in reality would go perfectly fine without.

Eliminating warnings can often be a hassle for no short-term benefit, and there's a decent number of people who agree that zero warnings is useful but don't actually get around to sticking to that if the compiler doesn't force them to.

The bigger benefit is when working with people that will just ignore warnings completely if you let them.