Re: gl_MANYWARN_ALL_GCC() leads to many spurious warnings

[Paul Eggert]

On 07/06/2012 02:17 PM, Samuel Bronson wrote:

> Why not simply use "-W -Wall -Wextra" and perhaps a few others, plus
> a few overrides to turn off the warnings those enable that aren't
> useful with Emacs?  That way, we'd only get warnings that had been
> reasonably well tested.

Something like that might well be useful, but it's a different option
than what's intended here.  --enable-gcc-warnings is intended for
developers, and it tries to take advantage of the latest and greatest
GCC features.  If it enabled only flags that work well on all GCC
versions, the static checking would be of considerably lower quality.

It might be useful to have another configure-time option that would
enable just the warnings that work fairly well back to GCC version
something-or-another, if someone wanted to maintain that.  It might be
a maintenance hassle, though, as there are lots of old and buggy GCCs
out there.

By the way, --enable-gcc-warnings does not actually enable all
warnings, only the warnings that work well with the latest GCC on
platforms that it's tested on.