compilation warnings: 'pointer targets ... differ in signedness'

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 24 September 2005 22:21, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> not really ... sometimes it can safely be ignored, but globally adding
> -funsigned-char is wrong ... if you're using a char and rely on it being
> signed, -funsigned-char will break that

If you're using a char and relying on it being signed, that's never been 
portable.  (I don't know if c99 finally got around to specifying it.)

A normal character string is "char *".  I don't think a pointer to a string 
literal is going to give you "unsigned char *", is it?  Yet I looked at 
loop.c and the API was feeding strings into something defined in linux/loop.h 
as "unsigned char *", and I went to great lengths to actually get us to the 
point where we were using the proper #include for that because the 
alternative was a nightmare.

Now we can stick in explicit casts to make the warnings shut up, but how is 
that an improvement?

Rob