Should Wextra warnings be fixed, or no?

[malespiaut]

Describe the cleanup

Activate -Wextra warnings and fix them.

It should be done because

A lot of -Wextra warnings are easy fixes, like -Wunused-parameter.

What are the alternatives?

No response

Additional context

I'm looking for a simple contribution to the XLibre project, and I thought that fixing warnings could be a good start.

Extra fields

• I have checked the existing issues
• I have read the Contributing Guidelines
• I'd like to work on this issue

[metux]

Indeed. Feel free to do this :)

Some of the issues require deeper changes (eg thats one of the reasons why I'm moving iteration over screens array into macros)

[stefan11111]

Depends on the warning.
Sometimes, the warning does indicate a problem, and it should be fixed.
Other times, it is just gcc being chatty, and fixing is would make the code less readable.

[clhin]

I see that a large amount of the warnings are unused-parameter warnings. I would probably be cautious about these, as they could cause ABI/API breakage. You might want to look into preprocessor macros for compatibility with old function headers if you are aiming to do this.

[malespiaut]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but unused-parameter warnings can easily be fixed by doing the following:

int function(int unused) {
  (void)unused;

[clhin]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but unused-parameter warnings can easily be fixed by doing the following:

int function(int unused) {
(void)unused;

I mean, you can do that, but its kind of sweeping the problem under the rug. I think a more elegant readable solution would be to modify the headers, and then create preprocessor macros for legacy purposes.

[malespiaut]

I understand what you mean, but not all unused-parameter cases are alike. For instance, when dealing with function pointers, the pointed-to functions must have compatible signatures, so you can't simply remove unused parameters. In such cases, using (void)unused is the correct and portable way to mark them intentionally unused.

For other cases, different solutions will apply.