Re: coreutils-6.3 on MacOS X

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> To turn off this warning one needs to pass -Wno-missing-field-initializers.
>
> OK, but I'm afraid the ship has already sailed with gcc -W on
> Coreutils.  Coreutils has several other places where gcc -W issues
> bogus warnings (typically about signed vs unsigned comparisons), and
> we're not inclined to change those either.  People who want to use gcc
> -W have to figure out how to ignore these bogus warnings, and adding a
> few more bogus warnings to the list shouldn't hurt all that much.
>
> I think gcc -W ought to get fixed to match typical programming style,
> not the reverse.  Until this gets done we might as well not worry
> _too_ much about what gcc -W says.  "The compiler should be your
> servant, not your master."

Thanks for the feedback, Bruno, but I agree wrt -W.
At least in the coreutils, there are just too many places
where -W produces false-positive and hard/messy-to-remove warnings.
I've tried, periodically, to enable that option, but the cost in
readability/maintainability (e.g., due to added casts) has always been
prohibitively high.