Re: defvars at compile time

[Richard Stallman]

    I'd strongly oppose it.  I could OTOH accept a policy that Emacs packages
    should not output any warning when compiled with the Emacs version that they
    come with.

We are more or less aiming for that, with the help of with-no-warnings
(which I added for this purpose), and we have removed nearly all of
the warnings that we used to have.  However, there are a few warnings
that are rather hard to remove.  And a few files use obsolete
constructs for backward compatibility.

    As mentioned, for your original problem, the byte-compiler was fixed so it
    doesn't generate a warning for this code any more.  For that particular
    problem, it is *the* clean way to fix the warning.  If you want to eliminate
    the warning without allowing yourself this clean fix (e.g. by insisting
    dogmatically that all warnings must go, even when compiling with some older
    byte-compiler), you'll end up with uglier and less maintainable code.

I agree with you.