bug#12981: list-packages (void-function mailcap-parse-mailcaps) due to an old mailcap.el file

bug#12981: list-packages (void-function mailcap-parse-mailcaps) due to an old mailcap.el file

[frances frederic]

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Hi 

I've recently installed emacs 24.2 on a debian virtual-box

After configuring elpa there was errors when running list-packages
So I've used toggle-on-error and got the following trace:

-------------
Debugger entered--Lisp error: (void-function mailcap-parse-mailcaps)
  mailcap-parse-mailcaps()
  url-do-setup()
  url-retrieve-synchronously("http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/archive-contents")
  package--download-one-archive(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/") "archive-contents")
  #[nil "\301\302\"\207" [archive package--download-one-archive "archive-contents"] 3]()
  package-refresh-contents()
  list-packages(nil)
  call-interactively(list-packages t nil)
  execute-extended-command(nil)
  call-interactively(execute-extended-command nil nil)
---------------

Then I tried to locate mailcap lisp library using M-x locate-library and found two locations:
M-x locate-library  mailcap
  - /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/flim/attic/mailcap.el   (this one did not contains   mailcap-parse-mailcaps)


M-x locate-library mailcap.el.gz
   - /usr/share/emacs/24.2/lisp/gnus/mailcap.el.gz


only the second one contains the function required by list-package but the first one is loaded probably because of load-path 

finally I remove the oldest version of mailcap.el and elpa works fine now.

I don't know if the old package comes from an old installation or if mailcap.el is included twice with 2 locations and one has not been updated.

Regards
frederic

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bug#12981: list-packages (void-function mailcap-parse-mailcaps) due to an old mailcap.el file

[Glenn Morris]

frances frederic wrote:

> M-x locate-library  mailcap
>   - /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/flim/attic/mailcap.el   (this one did not contains   mailcap-parse-mailcaps)

Thanks for the report. I'm not sure there is anything Emacs can do about
this. That file is not part of Emacs, it is part of "flim". In general,
you can break Emacs in arbitrary ways by installing arbitrary packages
at the head of load-path.

This issue was supposedly fixed in Debian flim a decade ago:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=110224