Re: [IDEA+RFC] Possible solution for min()/max() war

[Linus Torvalds]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Roman Zippel wrote:
>
> So why won't you let the compiler help you, even if it's not perfect in
> every case?

I considered enabling -Wsign-compare a long time ago, and it's not a
question of being "perfect", but a question of being _so_ broken that it's
not funny.

For example, let's look at this perfectly natural code:

	static int unix_mkname(struct sockaddr_un * sunaddr, int len, unsigned *hashp)
	{
		if (len <= sizeof(short) || len > sizeof(*sunaddr))
			return -EINVAL;
		...

Would you agree that the above is _good_ code, and code that makes
perfect sense, and code that does exactly the right thing in testing its
arguments?

Try to compile it with -Wsign-compare.

You'll get not one, but TWO warnings for code that is totally correct, and
that it would make _no_ sense in writing any other way.

In short, -Wsign-compare (at least with a _lot_ of gcc versions) warns for
totally sane and reasonable code - for code that exists all over the
kernel. The above snippet is in fact directly from the kernel, go look and
see for yourself.

In short, -Wsign-compare is totally useless. The warnings are mostly _so_
bogus that nobody has the energy to even try to figure out which of them
might actually be worthwhile.

Face it, you don't know what you're talking about.

		Linus