[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Colomban Wendling]

Le 12/03/2011 09:31, Yura Siamashka a écrit :
> On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 02:53:47 +0100
> Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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?
> 
> Sorry I have not read all thread but here is my 2 cents. Warnings as
> errors are bad because different compiler version can generate different
> compile warnings. So It can be pain for developer to find and fix all
> warning forall compiler versions in the world.
I wasn't talking about promoting all warnings to errors, only a few,
carefully-chosen, ones. Actually, implicit-function-declaration and
pointer-arith. IMO both problem are grave (implicit function declaration
prevents the compiler to check whether a function is called with
appropriate parameters, and untyped pointer arithmetic is unportable),
and I doubt any compiler would have such options doing something else
than what you can expect from the name.

> This issue is the same
> for for all other validation tools (valgrind, etc). Actually such
> maintains bother can be enough reason to abandon geany-plugins and move
> plugins to somewhere else.
It would probably be sad, and it's not the goal, but we try to find a
way to improve plugin quality. And to achieve this, we need to have some
criteria.
Of course the goal is not to enforce a ton of coding standards,
validation process and stuff, and if a particular developer have a
complain about something we will discuss it without problem.

But OTOH, if a plugin developer finds annoying to try to enforce a
minimal quality on his plugin (the less crashers possible, not too many
memory leaks, etc.), maybe geany-plguins don't want him. But I'm quite
confident all developers want their code to be the better, so they would
care :)

Cheers,
Colomban