unity-dev team mailing list archive

["Stephen M. Webb" <stephen.webb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 01/02/2013 09:43 PM, Daniel van Vugt wrote:
> Did the compiler really give a warning? As far as I can tell, Nux, Unity and Compiz already use "-Wall -Werror".
> 
> If mistakes still slip past gcc (and they do) then I recommend making your code compatible with clang because it gives
> more and better warnings/errors. We've done this for lp:compiz but I'm not sure if Nux and Unity are clang-friendly yet.

The compiler is unlikely to have given a warning in production builds since Unity, at least, does not compile with
-Wextra (or -Wunused).  My guess is this level of warning was not enabled because of the sheer amount of noise it
generates (which is itself a signal that should not be ignored).  We have it on our list as a low-priority item to be
able to build with -Wextra enabled but it's hard to justify thousands of lines of code churn when expanding and
improving overall unit test coverage will give us a better return on investment of our limited resources.

I believe that a proper test harness and test coverage would have caught the regression.  Almost all of the test cases I
have seen going in to Unity in the last few months have been to verify new functionality or regression tests for bug
fixes, and that's an improvement over past practices, but without a validation test suite we're still using the Edit and
Pray methodology.  The start of a new calendar year seems like a good time to start a renewed push for Quality in Unity.
 I am going to make expanded test coverage a priority part of the desktop Unity polish for 13.04 and I think the
investment will pay off going forward with other form factors.

-- 
Stephen M. Webb  <stephen.webb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>