Re: [Doxygen-develop] [PATCH] Add TREAT_WARNINGS_AS_ERROR option

[Gautier Pelloux-P. <ga...@da...>]

Hi Albert,

Thanks for your detailled opinion. Please see my inlined remarks below.

Gautier

> On 06 Dec 2015, at 12:03, Albert <alb...@gm...> wrote:
> 
> In principle all the errors and warnings doxygen gives should be removed by the engineers.
> 
> Doxygen distinguish between errors and warnings, where errors possibly corrupt the documentation building or are serious enough, in the eyes of the doxygen developers to stop the generation of the documentation. In case of an error the doxygen developer can also choose to give an error message but to continue anyway.
Should not it be a warning then? An error should have a consistent behavior during all processing, should it not?
> 
> When we would have the possibility to promote all the warnings to errors (and we should also stop at all errors that currently don't stop), it would mean that, when using the option, after each error a rerun is necessary. I think this is a bit overdone.
Well, that's the current behavior of -Werror for compilers. Indeed on first execution you will have a lot of stop&retry, but once it is done, you should not have many errors. And on first execution, you can temporary use -Wno-error to see all errors immediately if needed.
> I see some possibilities:
> - in case doxygen discovers warnings it does not finish with exit code 0 but with e.g. exit code 2 (and use exit code 1 for the errors on which it now already stops).
This solution suits me but if that possibility is adopted it might break many build systems where doxygen is expected to exit successfully in any case. Would it be a problem?
> - when using the proposed option the message is given as an error, but the process does not stop. I don't see this as an improvement as one can now catch the warnings in a log file and check them.
I am not sure to understand what do you mean there - proposed patch should exit on first warning?
> - all warnings get a number and the user can "promote" in the Doxyfile some warnings to, fatal, errors. This would be quite a big effort as all the messages have to be categorized (I've been thinking about this some time ago, but have not started to implement this as it is a lot of work and does not bring enough in my opinion, a quick estimation 700 messages to be checked).
Well, I agree with you that it would be both an ideal solution and a big effort which does not bring enough ;-).
> 
> The procedure I follow more or less is: Each time I'm building (overnight builds) the software I catch the warnings and errors in a warnings.log file. When this warnings.log file contains a message (or a new message compared to the last time the build was done) an email is send to the engineer who, last. changed the source file.
That's the step I want to avoid: having an external script/tool checking doxygen output to see if anything went wrong, while doxygen could tell me directly if I broke something. However this is more or less what I am aiming for.
> 
> 
> Albert
> 
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 9:34 PM, Gautier <ga...@da...> wrote:
> Hi list;
> 
> As stated on Github[1], I would like to add an option behaving similarly
> to compilers' -Werror option: any warning generated during Doxygen
> execution will abort it immediately.
> 
> This option is, in my opinion, valuable to keep documentation up-to-date
> with code changes, specially when multiple people are working altogether.
> I will not blame anyone to not think all consequence of a code change,
> but scripts can help him/her from breaking anything:
> 
> * strict compiler options (-Werror, -Wall, etc.) prevents at least some
> quick&dirty code and obvious bugs. Compilers will warn beginners about
> code which will not work (out of bounds errors, etc.), but most of the
> time it's simply about a typo / useless dead code.
> * Git hook preventing users from pushing invalid commits [2]. We are
> intensively using git submodules for instance - it's quite easy to push
> an invalid submodule reference to git:
>      * if you forgot to run "git submodule update --recursive" after
> pulling remote changes following by a "git commit -a", leading to
> unwilling submodule downgrading.
>      * if you're referencing a new submodule revision... which you
> forgot to push first!
> * To have better code consistency, following a single code style using
> clang-format[3], similarly to what systemd does[4].
> 
> I think that all of us already encountered one or several of these
> issues at least once ;-). Having tools checking these errors
> automatically allow me not to worry about it anymore.
> Our documentation contains nowadays many errors simply because Doxygen
> let us do that and we did not look at """inoffensive""" warnings, since
> they are not preventing us from continuing - they are lost in the
> verbosity of build logs.
> 
> I am the only one which would like such an option, and if so: how do you
> keep your documentation up-to-date?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Gautier
> 
> [1] https://github.com/doxygen/doxygen/pull/412
> [2] https://gist.github.com/bagage/bdca3d4b66d43db7a5e3
> [3] http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangFormat.html
> [4] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/master/autogen.sh
> 
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