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-Werror pain persists as Linus Torvalds issues Linux 5.15rc2

And celebrates Linux's 'true anniversary' – 30 years since upload of version 0.01

Linus Torvalds has revealed that winding back the decision to default to -Werror – and therefore make all warnings into errors – has made for another messy week of work on the Linux kernel.

"So I've spent a fair amount of this week trying to sort out all the odd warnings, and I want to particularly thank Guenter Roeck for his work on tracking where the build failures due to -Werror come from," Torvalds wrote in his weekly missive about the state of kernel development.

"Is it done?" he asked rhetorically. "No. But on the whole I'm feeling fairly good about this all, even if it has meant that I've been looking at some really odd and grotty code. Who knew I'd still worry about some odd EISA driver on alpha, after all these years? A slight change of pace ;)"

Torvalds expressed his annoyance that his efforts have seen him enter "fix one odd corner case, three others rear their ugly heads" territory.

But he's willing to wear the pain. "I remain convinced that it's all for a good cause, and that we really do want to have a clean build even for the crazy odd cases," he wrote.

And if he must handle this sort of thing in any week of the kernel production cycle, it might as well be the week of rc2.

"I hope this release will turn more normal soon – but the rc2 week tends to be fairly quiet for me, so the fact that I then ended up looking at reports of odd warnings-turned-errors this week wasn't too bad," he wrote.

Late last week, Torvalds also took some time to share what he described as "the true 30th anniversary date" of Linux.

On September 17th he wrote "a random note to let people know that today is actually one of the core 30-year anniversary dates: 0.01 was uploaded Sept 17, 1991.

"Now, that 0.01 release was never publicly announced, and I only emailed a handful of people in private about the upload (and I don't have old emails from those days), so there's no real record of that," he wrote. "The only record of the date is in the Linux-0.01 tar-file itself, I suspect.

"Just thought I'd mention it, since while unannounced, in many ways this is the true 30th anniversary date of the actual code."

So The Register thought it worthy of mention, too. ®

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