mxcl/homebrew — Issue #9728: Why does homebrew disable warnings?
Author: msabramo
Created: 2012-01-22 21:04:09+00:00
State: open

Homebrew adds -w to CFLAGS by default, which disables all warnings. This can be problematic not just because warnings can be missed, but also because packages that use autoconf and similar systems sometimes try to detect what functions are available and what their signatures are by compiling a little C program and relying on gcc to emit a warning that the function is undeclared. If warnings are disabled then the package may make incorrect assumptions about presence of functions or their signatures.

For a good example of this problem, see https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/pull/9453