Re: [PATCH] Revert "Enable '-Werror' by default for all kernel builds"

[Greg Kroah-Hartman]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2021 at 12:02:30PM +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > > Do we really want developers treat warnings as errors? When the code
> > > is okay but some random version of gcc dislikes it...
> > > 
> > > Plus, there's question of stable. We already get ton of churn there
> > > ("this fixes random warning"). WERROR will only encourage that...
> > 
> > I will not be backporting this patch to older stable kernels, but I
> > _want_ to see stable builds build with no warnings.  When we add
> > warnings, they are almost always things we need to fix up properly.
> 
> Well, everyone _wants_ to see clean builds... unless the price is too
> high.
> 
> > Over time, I have worked to reduce the number of build warnings in older
> > stable kernels.  For newer versions of gcc, sometimes that is
> > impossible, but we are close...
> 
> You clearly can't backport this patch, but for 5.16-stable, you'll
> have it in, and now warnings are same as errors... and I don't believe
> that's good idea for stable.

I do, it will force us to keep these trees clean over time.

And it will be in 5.15, not 5.16 :)

Worst case, we disable it in 4 years when gcc 15 or so generates so
many errors we can't resolve them in this old kernel.

thanks,

greg k-h