bug#69693: 30.0.50; package-load-desciptor: End of file during parsing

[Michael Heerdegen via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Divya Ranjan <divya@subvertising.org> writes:

> Thanks a lot, indeed the directory for the variable `package-user-dir'
> was the culprit. I cleaned it, and everything works as expected! I never
> knew that this directory is something even a new emacs build with `-Q`
> can use.

AFAIU, emacs -Q allows to install packages, and it uses the default
package directory and honors existing directory contents.

> But on the other hand, is this an expected behavior? Even though my
> problem is solved, I'd like to learn for what reason this happens.

The problem you reported is not expected.  That emacs -Q stumbles over
broken contents in the default directory is presumably hard to avoid.

To investigate we would have to find out what exactly was broken for
you, and what lead to the breakage.  Could be Emacs fault, the fault of
some installed package, a hardware problem, your fault, maybe the fault
of an interrupted installation, anything.  Hard to investigate if we
don't know in which direction.  Please tell us if this happens again.


Thanks,

Michael.