Re: Error "load: Symbol’s value as variable is void: \213" since 261d6afd6e6f3ba2bbf4db0d9ac57b0cbacc0137

[Zhiwei Chen]

Campbell Barton <ideasman42@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi ever since 261d6afd6e6f3ba2bbf4db0d9ac57b0cbacc0137 I'm getting an
> error starting emacs,
> to be sure there isn't anything strange going on, this happens with a
> clean build, ELN removed (with/without native compilation), and with a
> freshly installed package directory.
>
> --- error output ---
> Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-variable ‹)
>   eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*-527550> nil
> "/opt/emacs/share/emacs/29.0.50/lisp/calc/calc-loaddefs.el.gz" nil t)
> ; Reading at buffer position 3
>   
> load-with-code-conversion("/opt/emacs/share/emacs/29.0.50/lisp/calc/calc-load..."
> "/opt/emacs/share/emacs/29.0.50/lisp/calc/calc-loaddefs.el.gz" nil t)
>   load("calc-loaddefs.el" nil t)
>   require(calc)
> --- snip ---
>
> This error happens to be triggered by evil-mode but if I disable evil
> mode it gets triggered by lsp-mode, so it doesn't seem specific to a
> single package,
> although `emacs -Q` works without problems.
>
> I bisected the error to:
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=261d6afd6e6f3ba2bbf4db0d9ac57b0cbacc0137
>
> Is this a known problem or is it worth a fill bug report?

I suspect you're the victim of `file-name-handler-alist' optimization
[1]. Since it sets `file-name-handler-alist' to nil, it can't unpack
*.el.gz on-the-fly and then eval it.

    $ hexdump /usr/share/emacs/29.0.50/lisp/files.el.gz -C | head -n1
    00000000  1f 8b 08 00 00 00 00 00  02 03 ec 5c ff 73 db 46  
|...........\.s.F|

The '\213' (0x8b) is the second byte of an el.gz file.

[1]: https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs/blob/master/early-init.el#L31-L48

-- 
Zhiwei Chen