On Sun, Jun 26, 2022 at 11:16:51AM +0200, Omar Polo wrote:
> to complement yesterday's diff about -Wmissing-prototypes, here's an
> attempt to build got with -Wwrite-strings.  The purpose is to enforce
> some `const's here and there, in the hope to make some parts clearer.
> 
> It correctly picked up a few places where we were using "char *" (or
> "void *") but passing "const" pointers, and I'd also argue that in the
> case of got_diff_objects_as_trees it's actually better to have the
> pointers correctly marked as const.
> 
> There are also two downsides however:
> 
>  - i need to add a cast in got_dial_ssh.  I don't know how to trackle
>    argv without extra casts with -Wwrite-strings.  The compiler
>    complained that assigning to argv[x] a const char * was loosing
>    const, but execv wants a "char *const *", and I can't have argv
>    declared as `char *const argv[11]' either.  (why execv has such
>    signature?  meh)
> 
>  - got_path_find_prog becomes more complex.  it mixes const and
>    non-const char pointers, but it's carefully designed to not modify
>    the const strings.  The compiler isn't smart enough to notice it (nor
>    that it should.)  A possible solution in the long-term could be to
>    maybe drop this function: it's just used to find the editor to exec;
>    we could just try to exec $VISUAL, $EDITOR and /bin/ed in cascade and
>    use the first that works.  not for today tho :)
> 
> so i'm not sure if we want this in or to just backport some changes and
> call it a day.

No objection here. We could try it for a while and could get rid of it
again if it becomes annoying. The workarounds you had to apply are not
very bad, just awkward for someone who is not expecting const to be
honoured strictly (it seems Wwrite-strings simply backports fancy C++11
const semantics to plain C?)