Subject: bug#32213: savehist displays the message “Symbol’s value as variable is void” on startup

From: Jeremiah Peschka <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2018 13:39:33 -0700

This bug can be closed. The issue occurred on my system due to misconfiguration of macOS’s newsyslogd.

By default, newsyslogd inserts a timestamp into a file after the log has been rotated - the new file receives the timestamp. Since emacs expects savehist files to be formatted correctly as elisp, this leads to the error I saw on startup.

The fix for this is to modify the newsyslogd command to use the “B” flag. For example:

# logfilename [owner:group] mode count size when flags [/pid_file] [sig_num]
/Users/username/.emacs.d/.cache/savehist username: 644 5 * $W0 JB

Jeremiah Peschka