Re: Enable -Wstrict-prototypes and -Wold-style-definition by default

Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>

From: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Dave Cramer <davecramer@postgres.rocks>
Cc: Bertrand Drouvot <bertranddrouvot.pg@gmail.com>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2026-04-08T12:51:05Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 06.04.26 23:19, Tom Lane wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> writes:
>> The first three patches have been committed.
> 
> b4a132022 has had some not-so-desirable effects in the buildfarm:
> drongo and hoatzin are each spewing a couple dozen repetitive
> warnings about every bison-generated header file, eg
> 
> src/backend/bootstrap/bootparse.h(111): warning C4255: 'boot_yyparse': no function prototype given: converting '()' to '(void)'
> 
> Both of those machines are using bison 2.7, which is pretty old
> and evidently isn't careful about generating complete prototypes.
> 
> I'm not sure if there's anything to be done about this, except
> perhaps nag the animals' owners to find a newer bison somewhere.
> We could revert b4a132022, but then we might miss valid warnings
> about such issues in Windows-only code.

Let's try the nagging route.

I found it especially curious that hoatzin is a relatively new member, 
so why is it running this ancient Bison version?  Looking at the 
Chocolatey packages:

https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=bison

it appears that

     choco install winflexbison

gives you the old version, and you need

     choco install winflexbison3

to get a newer version.  So it seems easy to fall into that "trap" if 
you don't pay attention.

So perhaps these buildfarm members could update their Bison version 
sometime.

I found one mention of this command in our wiki 
(https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Meson#Windows), which I updated.  If 
we find any other documents or guides with these commands, we should try 
to get them updated, too.




Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Add warning option -Wold-style-declaration

  2. configure: Apply -Werror=vla to C++ as well as C

  3. Enable warning like -Wstrict-prototypes on MSVC as well

  4. Remove compiler warning option -Wendif-labels

  5. Disable warnings in system headers in MSVC

  6. Fix -Wstrict-prototypes warning in ecpg_init_sqlca() declaration.