Problem with autoconf not making gcc with -Wall warnings

Question

I have a simple project with a simple configure.ac script:

AC_INIT(...)
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([-Wall -Werror foreign])
AC_PROG_CC
AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([config.h])
AC_CONFIG_FILES(...)
AC_OUTPUT

using GNU Autoconf version 2.69 (OpenSUSE Linux with gcc 9.2.1), but gcc is being called with no warning flags:

gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I..    -g -O2 -MT aprog.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/aprog.Tpo -c -o aprog.o aprog.c
mv ...
gcc  -g -O2   -o aprog aprog.o -lgmp

In particular, I found -Wformat not working. Shouldn't -Wall include -Wformat? And shouldn't all warnings appear on the make line? If I run gcc line directly with -Wformat the warning shows in compile but it doesn't when I run autoconf, configure and make.

What I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

The -Wall flag in the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(...) invocation refers to warnings from automake and related tools like aclocal, not to compiler warnings. You will see these warnings when you are running autoreconf.

Note that while you can also add -Werror to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(...) to make your autoreconf run fail on warnings, many common macros (like those shipped with gettext or libtool) will still use deprecated macros which generates a warning, so -Werror means you cannot use this standard set of tools, so -Werror is not very useful in many cases.

If you want to add compiler options, there are a third party macros (e.g. AX_CHECK_COMPILE_FLAG) which test whether the compiler recognizes a given compile option and you can then add them to some variable and use that in places. That is a different stackoverflow question, though.