Should dcc use -Werror?

[andrewjbennett]

Proposal:

Use -Werror by default with dcc.

Advantages:

• Forces students to acknowledge (and fix) any compiler warnings, which do generally mean that there's a problem with their code.

Disadvantages:

• Attempting to demonstrate what happens with obviously-uninitialised variables (which give compiler warnings) will no longer work
  • Workaround: add -Wno-error manually when trying to demo something that dcc will otherwise stop you from doing.
• There might be some compiler warnings that students really don't need to care about ever.
  • Workaround: add -Wno-xxx flags to dcc where appropriate.
• There might be some compiler warnings that students only sometimes need to care about?
  • I can't think of any examples for this, can't suggest any workarounds (if there are indeed any needed).
• Code that works "just fine" with e.g. gcc -o blah blah.c (and no other flags) but that doesn't compile with -Werror will fail to compile and thus fail the automarking
  • I would consider this a feature, not a bug -- "your code doesn't work unless it works on CSE".