Fwd: -Wpointer-sign for GCC 4.1

Jim Blandy
2006-01-18T18:41:00Z

The message below is kind of odd. We do use -Wall, so if the pointer
sign warning will be printed when -Wall is specified, we'll still need
to pass an explicit argument to disable it. Which doesn't exactly
take the decision out of our hands, as we were hoping.

I think we should decide, for ourselves, whether we think the warning
is helpful or not, and then not be demure about doing the necessary
GCC stuff to enable or disable it. Hoping GCC would answer the
question for us was dopey.

I think there's some documentation value in reserving gdb_byte for
binary blobs and char for host-format text. It wouldn't have been
worth it before, but at this point we've got fixes for almost all
those warnings in place; we can't get those hours back, so the
cost/benefit is different now. So I think we should continue to
request the warning.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@synopsys.com>
Date: Jan 18, 2006 9:31 AM
Subject: Re: -Wpointer-sign for GCC 4.1
To: Mike Stump <mrs@apple.com>
Cc: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@false.org>, gcc@gcc.gnu.org

On Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 01:10:19AM -0800, Mike Stump wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2006, at 1:19 PM, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> >Someone's informed Richard Stallman that this (annoying) warning
> >will not be
> >enabled by default in GCC 4.1.
>
> >But, it currently seems to be. Should it be turned off before the
> >release?
>
> The SC or Jim Wilson will know more than I.
>
> > If not, who told RMS it was? :-)
>
> Likewise.

The Emacs developers were unhappy, so RMS complained to the SC, and there
was a discussion. At first RMS just wanted the warning to appear only
with --pedantic or -Wpointer-sign, but he was convinced that it should
also appear with -Wall.

So the answer is that, after consulting with some of the affected people
(which is why you got mail, Mike) the SC told RMS that it would be
changed. If it hasn't been done yet, then it's a release blocker,
because it was a promise the SC made.