RFC: Big Makefile patch for WARNS settings

[Doug Barton]

Ulrich Spörlein wrote:
> Dear -hackers,
> 
> I would like you to give me your thoughts on the attached patch. There
> are no functional changes, what I'm trying to do is introduce WARNS?=6
> for all top-level Makefiles and override that on a subdir basis.
> 
> Why the churn? Because I think it sticks out more, if there's a WARNS=0
> in your Makefile rather than the default being WARNS=0. Perhaps this
> gets more incentive going for fixing these WARNS.

I don't see how this provides an incentive at all.

I also object to this change on the grounds that down the road
debugging is potentially going to be more difficult when someone
forgets that there is a default WARNS level of 6.

One of the strengths of the BSD-style make is the amount of routine
stuff that goes on behind the scenes to make it easier to write good
makefiles. However I don't think this should be one of those things.

> There's also a lot of
> work done by the DragonflyBSD folks which I intend to port peu a peu.

Can you elaborate on this? What work are you planning to port over,
and how does it depend on this default WARNS level issue?

> Note: There are lots of style changes for games/ and sbin/, which I can
> seperate out for easier review. But I'd like to make some sweeping
> patches to bring them more inline with style.Makefile(5)

Putting these two changes in the same patch is not a good thing. It
makes it harder to read diffs, and commits that address separate
issues should be done separately anyway.

That said, I think that the style-compliance issue is a valid one, and
I personally would be in favor of that happening after the
8.0-release, FWIW.


hth,

Doug

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