Make all Perl warnings fatal - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

We have a lot of Perl scripts in the tree, mostly code generation and 
TAP tests.  Occasionally, these scripts produce warnings.  These are 
AFAICT always mistakes on the developer side (true positives).  Typical 
examples are warnings from genbki.pl or related when you make a mess in 
the catalog files during development, or warnings from tests when they 
massage a config file that looks different on different hosts, or 
mistakes during merges (e.g., duplicate subroutine definitions), or just 
mistakes that weren't noticed, because, you know, there is a lot of 
output in a verbose build.

I wanted to figure put if we can catch these more reliably, in the style 
of -Werror.  AFAICT, there is no way to automatically turn all warnings 
into fatal errors.  But there is a way to do it per script, by replacing

     use warnings;

by

     use warnings FATAL => 'all';

See attached patch to try it out.

The documentation at <https://perldoc.perl.org/warnings#Fatal-Warnings> 
appears to sort of hand-wave against doing that.  Their argument appears 
to be something like, the modules you use might in the future produce 
additional warnings, thus breaking your scripts.  On balance, I'd take 
that risk, if it means I would notice the warnings in a more timely and 
robust way.  But that's just me at a moment in time.

Thoughts?


Now to some funny business.  If you apply this patch, the Cirrus CI 
Linux tasks will fail, because they get an undefined return from 
getprotobyname() in PostgreSQL/Test/Cluster.pm.  Huh?  I need this patch 
to get past that:

diff --git a/src/test/perl/PostgreSQL/Test/Cluster.pm 
b/src/test/perl/PostgreSQL/Test/Cluster.pm
index 3fa679ff97..dfe7bc7b1a 100644
--- a/src/test/perl/PostgreSQL/Test/Cluster.pm
+++ b/src/test/perl/PostgreSQL/Test/Cluster.pm
@@ -1570,7 +1570,7 @@ sub can_bind
     my ($host, $port) = @_;
     my $iaddr = inet_aton($host);
     my $paddr = sockaddr_in($port, $iaddr);
-   my $proto = getprotobyname("tcp");
+   my $proto = getprotobyname("tcp") || 6;

     socket(SOCK, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)
       or die "socket failed: $!";

What is going on there?  Does this host not have /etc/protocols, or 
something like that?


There are also a couple of issues in the MSVC legacy build system that 
would need to be tightened up in order to survive with fatal Perl 
warnings.  Obviously, there is a question whether it's worth spending 
any time on that anymore.