As I do not understand the true nature of this bug, the title of this debbugs could be confusing. Please read the below in entirety. Related discussion is also on emacs-devel: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-07/msg00519.html Evaluating the below in emacs 24.5 emacs -Q results in the below error backtrace as expected: ===== Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil) string-match("." nil nil) string-match-p("." nil) (progn (require (quote package)) (if (member (quote ("melpa" . " http://melpa.org/packages/")) package-archives) package-archives (setq package-archives (append package-archives (list (quote ("melpa" . " http://melpa.org/packages/")))))) (package-initialize) (package-refresh-contents) (package-install (quote projectile)) (require (quote projectile)) (projectile-global-mode) (string-match-p "." nil)) eval((progn (require (quote package)) (if (member (quote ("melpa" . " http://melpa.org/packages/")) package-archives) package-archives (setq package-archives (append package-archives (list (quote ("melpa" . " http://melpa.org/packages/")))))) (package-initialize) (package-refresh-contents) (package-install (quote projectile)) (require (quote projectile)) (projectile-global-mode) (string-match-p "." nil)) nil) eval-last-sexp-1(nil) eval-last-sexp(nil) call-interactively(eval-last-sexp nil nil) command-execute(eval-last-sexp) ===== Minimal code to reproduce the issue: ===== (progn (require 'package) (add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "http://melpa.org/packages/") t) (package-initialize) (package-refresh-contents) (package-install 'projectile) (require 'projectile) (projectile-global-mode) (string-match-p "." nil)) ===== But evaluating the same on emacs-25 build results in: ===== Entering debugger... help-function-arglist: End of file during parsing ===== Also evaluating the above after M-x toggle-debug-on-error does not give a backtrace on the "help-function-arglist: End of file during parsing" error. This is a regression from how the actual error (wrong-type-argument stringp nil) backtrace showed up correctly on emacs 24.5 but is giving confusing and difficult to debug error on emacs-25. emacs-25 build info: In GNU Emacs 25.0.95.11 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.23) of 2016-06-29 built on ulcf41.cld.analog.com Repository revision: 6192b6c3a4374b2cb6e02ca865e1899a04a7f7dc Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.60900000 System Description: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation release 6.6 (Santiago) Configured using: 'configure --with-modules --prefix=/home/kmodi/usr_local/apps/6/emacs/emacs-25 'CPPFLAGS=-fgnu89-inline -I/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include' 'CFLAGS=-ggdb3 -O0' 'CXXFLAGS=-ggdb3 -O0' 'LDFLAGS=-L/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/lib -L/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/lib64 -ggdb3' PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/lib/pkgconfig:/home/kmodi/usr_local/6/lib64/pkgconfig:/cad/adi/apps/gnu/linux/x86_64/6/lib/pkgconfig:/cad/adi/apps/gnu/linux/x86_64/6/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig:/lib/pkgconfig:/lib64/pkgconfig' Configured features: XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND GPM DBUS GCONF GSETTINGS NOTIFY ACL LIBSELINUX GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE LIBOTF XFT ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK2 X11 MODULES -- -- Kaushal Modi