bug#35801: 27.0.50; [w32] Corrupt ~/.emacs.d/elpa/gnupg/ causes Emacs startup failure with gnu-elpa-keyring-update installed (was Re: Investigating Emacs startup failure)

[Richard Copley]

On Wed, 22 May 2019 at 07:42, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Richard Copley <rcopley@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 19 May 2019 20:28:14 +0100
>
> I got my Emacs into a state where it failed to start. I asked about it on help-gnu-emacs[1]. I fixed my Emacs,
> but didn't get to the bottom of the problem. Stefan asked me to make it a bug report: "such a corrupt directory
> shouldn't prevent use of Emacs".
>
> After installing "gnu-elpa-keyring-update-2019.3" from GNU ELPA, my Emacs stopped working: when invoked
> as "emacs" from the command line, it printed a message, then exited with status -1 without displaying a
> frame. The message was:
>
> GPG error: "no usable configuration", OpenPGP
>
> Emacs started normally when invoked as "emacs -Q". Having done that, I could load my init file with M-x
> load-file, and then everything looked normal and there were no messages or errors.
>
> I uninstalled all packages (the problem went away) and reinstalled them one-by-one. The problem came back
> after installing "gnu-elpa-keyring-update-2019.3".
>
> I tried renaming .emacs.d/ to reproduce the problem, but could not. On a hunch I deleted the gnupg/ directory
> in ~/.emacs.d/elpa before reinstalling the "gnu-elpa-keyring-update-2019.3" package. This fixed the problem,
> but also destroyed my means of reproducing it.

What would you suggest we do to make some progress with this bug
report?

Thanks.

If the the bug is that errors during package quickstart prevent Emacs from starting and can't easily be debugged, then it's easy to come up with a recipe.

Customize and save package-enable-at-startup and package-quickstart to t, run package-quickstart-refresh, edit package-quickstart.el and insert (error "test"), then invoke emacs. It should echo "test" and exit with status -1.

I hope that helps.

Thanks.