i notice that in the current master, debian/notmuch-emacs.README.Debian
contains the following stanza:

------------
* This package currently works only with emacs 23.  Users of 
  pre-release snapshots of emacs 24 can expect problems.
------------

I'm using notmuch (and notmuch-emacs) 0.16 with emacs24, and i don't
think i'm seeing any such problems.  But maybe i'm just lucky and/or
conservative and don't happen to tickle any of the incompatibilities?

Or is the above README (which is dated from 2011) stale?  If so, as a
user i'd appreciate an update that reflect the current expectations of
the notmuch development community about which versions of emacs are
considered well-supported for the upcoming 0.17 release.

           --dkg