Re: How to fix Emacs24 compiler warning w/o breaking code for previous versions

[David Engster]

Eric Schulte writes:
> I've been working to address the elisp byte-compiler warnings thrown
> while compiling the current Org-mode head, and I do not know how to
> address cases where the byte-compiler insists on usage of a new feature
> not present in older Emacsen without breaking Org-mode support of those
> Emacsen.  I'm writing to ask for the "best practices" approach?

Not that I think that it is a particularly good example (it's pretty
messy, actually), but you might want to look at the Gnus-git repo for
ideas. The problem with the "ignore warnings on older Emacsen" approach
is that pretty soon you will have difficulties spotting those warnings
which signal a real problem. This is especially true if you're using a
continuous build system like Gnus does.

At least for this automatic build, it currently restricts warnings to
the classes '(free-vars unresolved callargs redefine suspicious). If a
spurious warning from one of that classes pops up, we make the
byte-compiler be quite about it (see lisp/lpath.el in the Gnus repo).

-David