Don't use -Werror
&gt; Enabling -Werror in distributions virtually guarantees that they won&#x27;t build: Even if you took care of all compiler warnings in all compilers for which you enable this switch, it&#x27;s just a question of time till a new compiler version comes along that has a new warning message and - BOOM.<p>This is a feature.  This triggers a review of the new warnings introduced by the new compiler version, to see if they have found bugs, or should be squelched per false positive, or should be squelched project-wide.<p>&gt; Two recent examples are squid and qemu-linaro, two packages I had to compile from source as Debian GNU&#x2F;Linux didn&#x27;t have (good enough, or any) packages for them.<p>The fundamental problem here is using a contributor&#x27;s build environment (where I want -Werror to get them to contribute warning-induced bugfixes, or squelches&#x2F;ignores if they&#x27;re really false positives) for a non-contributor&#x27;s task (where they just want the final binary, and aren&#x27;t going to bother reporting the warnings even if I want them.)<p>Non-contributors building from source isn&#x27;t a relevant niche to me (I generally ship binaries), but I can sympathize with the request for a warnings-as-warnings fast build path for them.<p>But make -Werror the default build path, for developers.  This needs to be opt-out, not opt-in.