Re: Conditional compilation to avoid "assignment to free variable"

[Chetan <Chetan.xspam@xspam.sbcglobal.net>]

Michael Hoffman <4g4trz802@sneakemail.com> writes:

> I use the same .emacs file on multiple systems, and each have various packages
> installed. There are various forms in my .emacs to only interact with these
> packages if they are actually installed:
>
> (when (locate-library "auctex")
>   (load "auctex.el" nil t t)
>   (setq TeX-auto-save t))
>
> When I byte-compile, however, I get a warning like this:
>
> emacs.el:320:9:Warning: assignment to free variable `TeX-auto-save'
>
> Is there a way to skip over that form at compile time if the library cannot be
> found? I tried various permutations of using eval-when-compile, but I still get
> the warning.
>
> I suppose the other solution is to wrap the setq in a boundp check, but this
> seems silly as the result of the boundp check will be the same as the result of
> locate-library.
>
> In this case, I may be able to use a custom variable instead but I am looking
> for a more general solution.
C-h f eval-when-compile