Subject: Re: bug#72515: 29.4; describe-package-1: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p

From: "J.P." <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Aug 2024 11:03:42 -0700

Visuwesh <[email-masked]> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>>> From: Suhail Singh <[email-masked]>
>>> Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2024 15:23:11 -0400
>>> 
>>> Viewing the package description for a package that has two maintainers
>>> fails with the following error:
>>> 
>>> describe-package-1: Wrong type argument: char-or-string-p
>>> 
>>> This can be observed with emacs -Q.  Steps to reproduce.
>>> - M-x list-packages
>>> - Navigate to csharp-mode from GNU ELPA
>>> - Press RET to view the package description
>>> - Observe error
>>
>> Thanks.  I can reproduce this in Emacs 29, but not on the current
>> emacs-30 release branch, which will eventually become Emacs 30.1.  So
>> I guess we fixed this bug already during development of Emacs 30.
>
> This is the same as bug#68288 and bug#72250 if I'm not wrong.

I'm not sure there's much meaningful daylight between these three and

  68660 29.2; ELPA: Wrong type argument w. multiple maintainers in package-menu-mode

which addresses ELPA's end of the protocol bargain WRT package-archive
versioning and multiple maintainers. To me, they're really just two
sides of the same coin, so I've gone ahead and merged them (this and
bug#68660).

GNU ELPA should IMO remain backwards compatible with Emacs releases
currently packaged by mainstream GNU/Linux distributions, such as
Debian. Would-be ERC 5.6 users on Emacs versions 29 and below keep
running into this bug in the wild and will continue to do so for a good
while, it seems.

As I've expressed in bug#68660, I think ELPA should either migrate its
current web endpoint to a /v2 for Emacs 30.1's new format, or it should
revert to serving the infamous "concatenated" variant of the
:maintainers data item for everyone. (That's the old format with the
names of all maintainers mashed together along with all but the last
email address, which stands apart [1].)

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-erc/2024-01/msg00051.html