gratuitous gcc warnings: unused function arguments?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:36 PM -0800 1/16/05, David O'Brien wrote:
>On Sun, Jan 16, 2005, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>  > At 9:05 PM +0000 1/16/05, Robert Watson wrote:
>>  >On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, David O'Brien wrote:
>>  > > We're not going to hack GCC to deal with this.  That is going way
>>  > > too far.  This is coming up because people are using high WARNS
>  > > > values in Makefiles.  Either back them down to a lower WARNS
>  > > > value; or we should add -Wno-unused-parameter to WARNS level 3.
>  > >
>  > > I'd be fine with simply pushing threshold for unused parameters
>  > > up a few notches on the warning scale.  I'd like to have access
>  > > to the other interesting warnings are WARNS=3 and WARNS=4 relating
>  > > to qualifiers, strings, etc.
>  >
>>  I think it would be useful to keep that warning "in general", but
>>  have an option to turn it off.  The following seems to work for me,
>>  assuming we can decide on the best name for a new NO_WUNUSED_ARGS
>>  option:
>
>Do you have a piece of code that exhibits this warning but otherwise
>could pass at higher warning level?

Who?  Robert?  Or me?  I might, but I can't think of any at the moment.
However, I have had cases where this warning has pointed out bugs to
me -- such as a routine using a global variable because it had misspelled
a reference to one of its own parameters.  So, "in general" I do think
this is a useful warning.  And I (personally) prefer using __unused or
the '(void)some_arg;' trick to silence the warning.

>I'm resistant to adding a lot of NO_FOO_WARNING knobs.  Otherwise we
>might as well as remove the whole WARNS thing and set each warning a
>Makefile wants.

If developers would prefer to always turn it off for WARNS=3 and
WARNS=4, that is certainly fine with me too.  I agree that we do not
want a lot of NO_WARN_FOO options, but I can see where this warning
might be very annoying for a few (otherwise clean) source files.  I
wouldn't want those source files to be compiled with WARNS=2 (or to
avoid -Werror) for no other reason than to avoid hassles with this
one check.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu