Estimated read time: 1 minutes
This is always an interesting area. The avarage user needs a whole day to test a oneliner patch, just because she never built the software in question, etc. The other end of the line is a regular developer, she modifies the source and she is able to test in seconds.
Regarding git, the testing part is not that hard: I usually work on builtins, so I edit the source code, then type 'make git-foo', and run ./tnumber-desc.sh from the testsuite.
The other part is that you need special compiler flags, since you are interested in extra warnings, debug symbols and such.
The default CFLAGS is defined in the Makefile, which is a tracked file, so modifying that is a no-go. You need 'make configure', then ./configure, and then you can edit config.mak.autogen.
Junio a few days ago mentioned the CFLAGS he uses.
Here comes the interesting part:
CC = ccache cc CFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall -Werror -fno-inline -Wold-style-definition -Wdeclaration-after-statement
-Werror so that I'm forced not to ignore warnings, -fno-inline to be able to debug inline functions, and I just stole the two others from Junio.