Re: Minor cleanup after adding more warnings to CFLAGS

"Kevin J. McCarthy" <[email protected]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 09:16:52 +0800

Newsgroups	gmane.mail.mutt.devel
Message-ID	<aeA4hA4fYAH-PBNC@qinghai>

On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 03:45:01PM +0200, Rene Kita wrote:
>I played around a bit more and unless we are going to make -Wcast-qual a
>default warning I don't think it's worth it to fix more warnings coming
>from that flag.

Let's not take that step right now.  We've already done some good 
cleanup and fixed bugs in the process

>If we decide to go all in we should just drop every const where we can't
>prove that we adhere to it.

Dropping consts all over in mutt would limit the usefulness of some 
other things, like mutt_b2s(), which returns a const char * because 
modifying the EOS without adjusting dptr results in bugs...

I'd be interested if we could get a little further along to safety by 
adopting the same mechanism glibc recently did for strchr and the 
others.  I haven't looked into what dark arts were involved.

Alternatively, we could create wrappers around those kind of "token" 
functions in mutt that take a string as a parameter and return a 
pointer inside that same const/noconst string back.  Something like:

   const char *next_foo_const(const char *foo) { ....  ;return foo;}
   char *next_foo(char *foo) {return (char *)next_foo_const(foo);}

It still has a cast in the wrapper, but it's controlled, and the caller 
can choose the appropriate function without having to make its own, 
perhaps more dangerous, cast.

-- 
Kevin J. McCarthy
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