bug#20355: 25.0.50; Package installation fails without a fully loaded init file

["Jorgen Schäfer" <contact@jorgenschaefer.de>]

On Sun, Apr 19, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> I recently accidentally uninstalled a package required by my init.el.
>> The result was that starting Emacs failed. I then could not install the
>> package again, though, as package-install failed with an error "the init
>> file was not fully loaded".  I suspect the latter is from the attempt to
>> set `package-selected-packages'.  The same error happened when I started
>> Emacs with -q.
>
> Hmm... could you give a slightly more detailed recipe.  I think
> package.el does not degrade gracefully enough in such "inconsistent"
> states, indeed.

Oh, sorry, of course.

$ mkdir tmpemacs
$ HOME=$(pwd)/tmpemacs emacs

Use M-x package-install to install company-statistics (as the first
package I found that depends on another). Terminate Emacs, and do:

$ rm -rf tmpemacs/.emacs.d/elpa/company-0.8.12
$ cat tmpemacs/.emacs.d/init.el
(package-initialize)
(require 'company-statistics)
$ HOME=$(pwd)/tmpemacs emacs

This throws some warnings because company is missing, and an error
because company-statistics can not be loaded. M-x package-install RET
company RET throws the error I mentioned originally, as does M-x
package-list-packages:

custom-save-all: Cannot save customizations; init file was not fully loaded

All of these operations work on the second try, so it's not a complete
lock-down, but it's annoying :-)

Regards,
Jorgen