bug#16573: 24.3; Auctex (11.87.2) in Elpa issues hundreds of warnings on compile

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Admittedly I haven't spent much time dealing with compatibility with
>> older Emacsen lately, but in the past I've never found warnings useful
>> for that work.  So I only ever used warnings to help debug & improve my
>> code on my "main" Emacs version, and completely ignored warnings when
>> porting to older Emacsen (relying on testing and bug-reports instead).
> I can't speak for other eLisp libraries, but testing came late for Org
> and test coverage isn't quite up where it would need to be for this to
> work.

By testing I meant "start up an old Emacs and try to play a bit with the
feature see if it seems to work".  Of course, if you have a test suite
scripted up and all, that's even better.

> Besides, testing on older Emacsen gets rather difficult since they
> don't compile on my system any more and I'd need to set up a container
> or VM.

"dpkg" was able to install emacs19, emacs20, emacs21, emacs22, emacs23,
emacs24 on my machines, so I haven't had to build them by hand.


        Stefan