[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 12/03/2011 10:49, Lex Trotman a écrit :
> On 12 March 2011 20:21, Frank Lanitz <frank at frank.uvena.de> wrote:
>> On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:53:47 +0100
>> Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
>>
>>>> Maaaybe, sort of see your point, but not really convinced that
>>>> uprating warnings to errors is a good idea on the dev codebase, it
>>>> stops people trying and testing things.
>>> Unfortunately, believe me that non-fatal warnings are use to be
>>> ignored by unexperienced programmers, believing that if their code
>>> compile it is then OK.
>>> And I don't see why a warning upgraded to an error on every build
>>> would be worst than a syntactical problem (as I described above
>>> previously)? In a typical situation, the developer who writes the
>>> plugin should get the warning (well, the error), see his plugin don't
>>> build, care (hopefully :D), and then fix it directly even before
>>> committing and then before anybody else could face the problem.
>>> Don't you think?
>>
>> Just thinking about adding a flag which is activating a paranoid
>> check inside default build system and which lead into failing buildsin
>> such a case. This would give plugin devs the chance to fix their code
>> on one hand and unexperienced people which just want to test to have a
>> build they can do their stuff with.
> 
> Yeah, so long as it doesn't make the whole system too complicated and
> is well documented, it has to be easily usable and maintainable :-)
It would be easy to add a flag to enable/disable the warnings (actually
I already had a flag to disable the warnings, thought they was enabled
by default). However in Autotools side it's probably only really doable
at configure-time, don't know for Waf.

So you'd prefer what:
1) enable warnings by default, and propose some to errors with a flag
2) no warnings by default, can be enabled by a flag (with or wtithout
error promotion?)

IMHO 1) is better so the developers gets the warnings, and it would
still please everyone since these wouldn't be fatal -- only ugly :D.

If we finally agree with the flags I suggested minus the errors, I could
set this up soon. Needs agreement (or not) then :)

Cheers,
Colomban