[Geany-devel] Ideas on increasing quality of plugins

[Frank Lanitz]

On Sat, 12 Mar 2011 15:55:52 +0100
Colomban Wendling <lists.ban at herbesfolles.org> wrote:

> 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 :)

I think we shall start with the compiling flags (I'm not this familiar
with them so I cannot say which of them are really useful) with just
warnings for the start. This should give a first impression to
everybody where we are and some period we can do the next steps. As a
new release for Geany-plugins is not scheduled yet it should also be
fine to add them in a first step directly.

Cheers, 
Frank
-- 
http://frank.uvena.de/en/
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