Problem with desktop.el

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Hi,

I recently had a desktop restore fail, and the reason was that instead
of the version number 206, in a lot of places instead the character
\316 had been placed.

>From scanning over the source, it would seem that this happens when
desktop restoration is not complete when one saves the desktop again.

What I imagine happened is that I accidentally started Emacs, then
pressed the "Close Window" button on the Emacs frame before loading
the desktop completed, and that Emacs then saved the incompletely
loaded desktop including inserting the version number with "insert"
while it was set to a number.

It might have happened at a read-input call asking for a "y or n"
confirmation about whether it was safe to load a particular buffer's
local variable section.

There are two problems here, I think.  One is that a desktop was saved
while loading it was still in progress.  The other is that the setting
of the desktop-file-version variable is sometimes an integer,
sometimes a string.  Maybe the latter is not a problem if desktop
saving does not happen while the load is still in progress.  But the
resulting unreadable desktop.el does not seem like a reasonable
effect.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum