Re: [Qemu-devel] [RFC PATCH] osdep.h: Prohibit disabling assert() in supported builds

[Markus Armbruster]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> We already have several files that knowingly require assert()
> to work.  While we do NOT want to encourage the use of
> 'assert(side-effects)' (that is a bad practice that prevents
> copy-and-paste of code to other projects that CAN disable
> assertions; plus it costs unnecessary reviewer mental cycles
> to remember our project policy on crippling asserts), we DO
> want to send a message that anyone that disables assertions
> has to tweak code in order to compile, making it obvious that
> we are not going to support their efforts.
>
> Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
> ---
>
> First mentioned as an idea here:
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2017-07/msg06084.html
> but I'm titling this RFC as I'm not 100% convinced we want to make
> it a project-wide, rather than a per-file decision.

I'm fine with project-wide, but does it have to be a hard error?  Can we
make it a warning?  Same effect by default, but it lets people
experiment more easily with --disable-werror.