Myths About Open Source Development

jpkunst writes "A thought-provoking article by chromatic on oreillynet, listing eight "myths" that Open Source developers tell themselves. For example: Myth: Publicly releasing open source code will attract flurries of patches and new contributors. Reality: You'll be lucky to hear from people merely using your code, much less those interested in modifying it."

Comments

Re:On warnings

[pclminion]

What if in function x, there is a variable that I have defined but do not use for some specific reason

You can use GCC's attribute system:

int foo __attribute__ ((unused));

GCC supports all kinds of cool attributes, both for functions and variables. For example, the ((deprecated)) attribute marks a variable as deprecated, and will produce a warning if any code uses that variable.

However, these methods are not portable. On nearly any compiler I can imagine, the cleanest and simplest way to supress an unused variable warning is to assign the variable to itself:

int x;
x = x; /* shut up compiler warning */

Run 'info gcc' to get the full documentation. Go to the "C Extensions" section. GCC is littered with HUNDREDS of very cool extensions. Just make sure it's worth giving up portability...