In a new post to his site Volker Dusch shares his thoughts about warnings in coding style checks (and how they differ from real errors).

When it comes to coding standards there is one rule that always makes me cringe when I stumble upon it: "Lines SHOULD be less than 120 chars long. If not a warning will be issued." Let me try to make a point why I consider WARNINGS in coding guideline checks hurtful.

He defines a warning first, so there's no confusion (something that should be done, but doesn't have to) and why he thinks there's not much of a place for them in the code guidelines. He suggests that, by having them, they take away time from the real issues, the errors. He notes that "should" rules on formatting shouldn't be added to your QA tools right away. Adding too many of these that spit out too many warnings (not errors) could just muddy the waters and make the developers more confused.