The general idea of this issue is that Zabbix should compile without warnings, even when many of available -W... options are specified to the compiler (for the purposes of this discussion, the targeted compiler will be GCC).

The first thing to decide upon is the version of C standard we support. Currently, we do not have any official convention, but de facto we write code according to C99. For instance, we use type uint32_t (which, as far as I remember, was not available in C90) and we use string literals with length over 509 (as reported by -Woverlength-strings, see below).

The second thing is to compile cleanly with the following and maybe other warning options enabled (see http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Warning-Options.html for the full list): -Wcast-align, -Wcast-qual, -Wconversion, -Wdeclaration-after-statement (this is in our development conventions), -Wempty-body, -Wfloat-equal, -Wignored-qualifiers, -Wmissing-field-initializers, -Wmissing-include-dirs, -Woverlength-strings, -Wpointer-arith (currently, we seem to avoid pointer arithmetic for Windows, but are OK with it on Unix), -Wpointer-sign, -Wsign-compare, -Wtraditional with -Wno-long-long (currently, we require preprocessor directives to start in the first column, which is checked by -Wtraditional), -Wtype-limits, -Wvla, -Wwrite-strings.

Also, GCC has one nice feature: if it notices that arguments to printf() or scanf() are incorrect, it issues a warning. By including attributes and compiling with -Wformat and -Wmissing-format-attribute, we could get the same checks for zabbix_log() and other functions.