Re: The poor quality of Emacs's backtraces

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Ihor.

On Tue, Jul 18, 2023 at 11:54:36 +0000, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> >> This is curious. I tried to branch and got several native-comp errors:

> > Thanks for actually trying this out!

> > One thing I forgot to say: you need to run make bootstrap, since the
> > format of some internal structures is being changed.  If you didn't do
> > this, please try it.  If you did run make bootstrap, please let me know,
> > then I will take a closer look at your backtraces.  Thanks!

> I did. Now, to be sure, I also did make extraclean; ./autogen...;
> ./configure...; make boostrap
> And then also removed eln-cache dir.

> Things changed somewhat:

> In toplevel form:
> eval-sexp-fu.el:121:2: Warning: Package cl is deprecated
> eval-sexp-fu.el:145:2: Warning: custom-declare-variable 
> `eval-sexp-fu-flash-error-face' docstring wider than 80 characters
> /home/yantar92/.emacs.d/straight/build/eval-sexp-fu/eval-sexp-fu.el: Error: 
> Wrong type argument listp

> /home/yantar92/.emacs.d/straight/build/helm-dash/helm-dash.el: Error: Wrong 
> type argument listp

> No backtrace this time.

Excellent!

> Not sure if it is related to the branch.

I've not been able to install helm successfully on standard Emacs, but
those "error messages" illustrate to some extent the problem I'm trying
to solve.  They give no location, beyond a file name, for the problem;
they don't say what isn't a list, and don't say what primitive detected
its not being a list.

If you know helm well, can you say whether or not it handles function
structure explicitly?  Doing things like assuming the element of a
lambda form following 'lambda is the parameter list?  This might be the
cause of the problem.

> -- 
> Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
> Org mode contributor,
> Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
> Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
> or support my work at <https://liberapay.com/yantar92>

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).