joaotavora@gmail.com (João Távora) writes:

> The misbehaving propagated silently and I came across this using M-x
> package-install RET ... RET, which magically compiles a 0-byte package.
I had same problem when using package-install with restricted network
connection (or bad network conditions), sometimes I got empty buffer
without any error where as it should fail.

> I think the protocol for url-retrieve-synchornously could be
> revised. Its users seem to expect it to return nil or at least a
> non-buffer if something went wrong, but that's clearly not what happened
> here. Perhaps it should error.
I agree.

So I proposed a patch for this: