Dear Maintainer,

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Emacs would not start up, giving a
"Symbol's function definition is void: debian-startup" error.
While searching for the problem, discovered

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26870976/emacs-startup-symbols-function-definition-is-void-debian-startup,

which, while not dealing with the real cause, helped with the
solution.

An emacs update to testing arrived this morning, and in
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp, I found this:
is bogus, and it prevents the real one from being loaded.

Soled by renaming the bogus file (debian-startup.elc).

- -- System Information:
Debian Release: forky/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 7.0.12.khufu (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_OOT_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

- -- no debconf information
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I have found a similar bug (#1139706) in package "elpa-with-editor",
which also involves an empty .elc file. It looks like something is wrong
with whatever creates these files on installation, so it might be best
to chech other packages as well. I've looked for more empty .elc files
under /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/ and  I don't see any,but thenI don't
have all emacs packages.

  .....Ron

Ron Murray <rjmx@rjmx.net> writes:

The .elc files are generated at install time, not actually shipped in
the package.
It would be helpful to know about any messages during the install of
emacsen-common, and whether you can duplicate the problem by
re-installing the package.

BTW, do you have lots of disk space in /usr? What filesystem is it?

d

I realised that the .elc files were compiled at install time because they didn't appear when I did dpkg --listfiles emacsen-common. I have about 65G of disk space left on / (which includes /usr), and it's an xfs filesystem.

I'll try to do a re0install later today.

 .....Ron