Proposal: Run cppcheck on Entire Source Code in CI

[sasakisasaki]

Proposal: Run cppcheck on Entire Source Code in CI

Background

• Currently, CI runs cppcheck only on files changed in a PR. This means issues in untouched parts of the codebase — for example, unused functions — can go unnoticed if the file itself isn’t modified.
• We do have a weekly full run, but its results are easy to miss.

Proposal

• Update CI so that PR checks run cppcheck on the entire source code, not just changed files.
• Fail the check if new issues are found.
• Use suppression files for known false positives or legacy issues.

Pros

• Detects issues like unused functions, style problems, or potential bugs anywhere in the codebase.
• Improves overall quality and consistency.

Cons

• Adds 1–2 minutes to CI runtime (total about 15 mins for cppcheck).
• 1-2 minutes for running current cppcheck on only changed files, but 15 minutes for entire source code
  • May be offset by using a more powerful instance.
• May surface many existing warnings initially.

Possible mitigations

• Suppress known issues.
• Encourage local cppcheck before push.
• Fix legacy issues incrementally.

Previous Discussion

• https://github.com/orgs/autowarefoundation/discussions/4827

---

What do you think about enabling this for all PRs? Your comments and feedback are highly appreciated.

[sasakisasaki]

The cppcheck for entire code which is running weekly is failing (that is why we could detect such the unused functions)

• https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware_universe/actions/workflows/cppcheck-weekly.yaml

[xmfcx]

We've agreed to focus on first fixing the existing cppcheck failures. Once this workflow is green, we'll start monitoring its state. Then when it fails again, we'll look into what went wrong and how we can fix it.

We cannot find out right now because this workflow has been failing since 2024-09-09 (for the past year).