> Unfortunately it's not as simple as always enabling -Werror:

I was already bitten in the backside by Werror. Allow me to tell you how.

I was working on a legacy C++ project and my employer uses an in-house build system that automatically builds the whole dependency tree if any dependency changes. A previous team was a staunch supporter of the "no Werror considered harmful" philosophy, and made it their point to even pass it to unit tests.

That's all fine and dandy, except compilers are upgraded and older compiler versions are deprecated out of our reach. Consequently, when I did a minor update to my project and launched a build job, the entire dependency tree started failing left and right, throwing a million error messages as a packed wall of text. The root cause? The current version of GCC was updated to throw warnings regarding some inane drivel involving white spaces, and with Werror passed everywhere those were upgraded to full blown errors.

The end result was a couple of weeks wasted going through the dependency tree to tackle warnings, because otherwise the build pipeline failed spectacularly.