Subject: bug#26241: 25.1; Re: emacsclient in 25 branch: error opening any file

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2017 12:24:28 -0700

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 09:56:58PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 24 Mar 2017 10:48:05 -0700
> > From: [email-masked]
> > Cc: [email-masked]
> > 
> > I'm writing to know about the status of this bug:
> > 
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-06/msg00036.html
> > 
> > which is affecting me as well. I get the same "Waiting for Emacs...
> > *ERROR*: Wrong type argument: stringp, nil" after emacs has been running
> > for a while.
> 
> Since this doesn't happen right away, there's something that gets
> broken in the Emacs session.  We need to know the details: which
> function signals this error, and preferably also why.  Since this
> doesn't happen to others, I don't see how we can make progress without
> more details about the problem, sorry.

You could instrument 'emacsclient' to produce a stack trace, with an
option analogous to --debug-init. It would be useful for future bugs
as well. "Wrong type argument" is better than nothing, but we agree
that it's not very useful.

Both myself and the other reporter seem to have noticed the problem
appearing in Emacs 25. Actually for me, an Arch Linux user, looking at
the dates in /var/cache/pacman/pkg I think the problem may have
occurred after emacs-25.1-4-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz (installed Feb 7) since
the previous patch level 25.1-3 was installed Dec 24 2016 and I don't
remember any crashes so long ago. But Joseph's original report is 9
months old. I have of course made changes to ~/.emacs in this time but
I have very little idea what of that code is run by emacsclient. It
seems likely that the problem stems from a change that was made to
Emacs, and we have a record of such changes, so it may be useful to
check that record.

Thanks for your reply.