Re: [PATCH v2 08/10] Fix up a bunch of "gcc -Werror=sign-compare" complaints

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/7/21 11:44, Robbie Harwood wrote:
> it's odd to me to hear disabling it being the suggested course
> of action (especially given it's in the gcc -Wextra set, not some random
> flag).

Not odd at all. High-quality static-checking tools have tons of options 
for a reason, and one shouldn't assume that the tools' defaults are 
right for your project because (assuming the project is sufficiently 
complex, which GDB certainly is) they probably aren't.

Part of the problem here is that there are two conflicting attitudes 
about types like size_t. The traditional attitude is that one should 
compute sizes using size_t arithmetic, and be very careful about integer 
overflow because it's well-defined behavior in C so your runtime won't 
report it and your program will likely misbehave in mysterious ways 
later. Gnulib was originally written that way; however, some of its 
modules have been redone to follow a newer approach, in which one should 
compute size using ptrdiff_t arithmetic, and (while still being very 
careful about overflow) hope that your runtime will report it right away 
so that bugs are more likely to be caught and can be fixed more easily. 
This latter hope is realized with gcc -fsanitize=undefined, so this is a 
win over the traditional approach.

gcc's -Wsign-compare flag was designed more with the traditional style 
in mind, and it hasn't really caught up with the newer style. I hope GCC 
catches up someday; in the meantime, I've found it better to disable 
-Wsign-compare than to pacify it, as pacification makes code harder to 
maintain (and so, likely buggier) and can mask some other errors.


> As you point out with coreutils, gnulib taking a position like this on
> flags has the knock-on effect that, for our grub, we'll need to do one
> of the following:
>
> - Carry a gnulib patch to make the flag work (what we've been doing).
> - Change flags in the outer work (i.e., change build options for grub)
> - Maintain logic to keep flags gnulib-disliked flags out when building
>    the gnulib modules

Every other Gnulib-using project I know takes the third approach.