Re: crash in emacs-21.1

[Richard Stallman]

    I have loaded all of them without any problem here with the current CVS and
    with released 21.1 too.

I think Daniel said they crashed when he ran them.  So the fact that
you were able to load them partly confirms the existence of the
problem: Emacs loads them without objecting, but can't run them.

There are two things to investigate:

1. What is the first sexp in each of these files?
Can we make Emacs look for that and refuse to load them?

2. Why do they crash?

      if (STRINGP (args[1]) && STRING_MULTIBYTE (args[1]))
        /* BYTECODE-STRING must have been produced by Emacs 20.2 or the
           earlier because they produced a raw 8-bit string for byte-code
           and now such a byte-code string is loaded as multibyte while
           raw 8-bit characters converted to multibyte form.  Thus, now we
           must convert them back to the original unibyte form.  */
        args[1] = Fstring_as_unibyte (args[1]);

This was a real change, but it seems that older .elc files can still
be loaded successfully--if the comment is accurate.

Is there evidence that there is a problem with executing pre-20.2 .elc
files?  Is that the cause of the problem we're looking at?