The lunacy of -Werror

First, a little history for those of you young enough not to have lived through perl. In the perl man page, there's a comment in the BUGS section that says:

The -w switch is not mandatory.

(The -w switch enables warnings about grotty code.) Unfortunately, many developers misunderstood this. They wrote their perl script, and then added the -w switch as though it was a magic bullet that fixed all the errors in your code, without even bothering to think about looking at the output it generated or - heaven forbid - actually fixing the problems. The result was that, with a CGI script, your apache error log was full of output that nobody ever read.

The correct approach, of course, is to develop with the -w switch, fix all the warnings it reports as part of development, and then turn it off. (Genuine errors will still be reported anyway, and you won't have to sift through garbage to find them, or worry about your service going down because the disk filled up.)

Move on a decade or two, and I'm starting to see a disturbing number of software packages being shipped that have -Werror in the default compilation flags. This almost always results in the build failing.

If you think about this for a moment, it should be obvious that enabling -Werror by default is a really dumb idea. There are two basic reasons:

1. Warnings are horribly context sensitive. It's difficult enough to remove all the warnings given a single fully constrained environment. As soon as you start to vary the compiler version, the platform you're building on, or the versions of the (potentially many) prerequisites you're building against, getting accidental warnings is almost inevitable. (And you can't test against all possibilities, because some of those variations might not even exist at the point of software release.)
2. The warnings are only meaningful to the original developer. The person who has downloaded the code and is trying to build it has no reason to be burdened by all the warnings, let alone be inconvenienced by unnecessary build failures.

To be clear, I'm not saying - at all - that the original developer shouldn't be using -Werror and fixing all the warnings (and you might want to enable it for your CI builds to be sure you catch regressions), but distributing code with it enabled is simply being rude to your users.

(Having a build target that generates a warning report that you can send back to the developer would be useful, though.)