Spacemacs fails to start with error "Symbol's value as variable is void: \213"

[Zlopez]

Hi,

I tried to use spacemacs with flatpak emacs and if I switch to develop branch, which is recommended, I'm hitting this issue:

Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading ‘/home/zlopez/.emacs.d/init.el’:

Symbol's value as variable is void: \213

To ensure normal operation, you should investigate and remove the
cause of the error in your initialization file.  Start Emacs with
the ‘--debug-init’ option to view a complete error backtrace.

This could be related to syl20bnr/spacemacs#11585. According to discussion this issue is about missing gnutls. I looked at freedesktop.Sdk runtime and it looks like gnutls is not part of this runtime.

[Zlopez]

I was able to install spacemacs from develop branch using workaround from syl20bnr/spacemacs#12535, but I'm still hitting the issue.

Spacemacs is working in standard emacs 26.2 installed from rpm package on Fedora 30 Silverblue, so this looks like flatpak only issue.

[philn]

OK I apologize but I think this should be reopened. Today I installed the emacs flatpak update containing the commit from #26 and got the symbol value error again.
As this happens when emacs checks for updates on ELPA, the error isn't raised at every startup... I'd need to force Emacs to always look for updates so I can reliably reproduce the issue...

[muep]

Thank you for investigating the issue.

I do not have time to look at this much right now, but what I'd expect to do if I had time, would be to try to do a connection from some bit of elisp, similarly to but separately from what the failing program does. Then if there is a wider problem e.g. with TLS support missing, it should be easy to experiment with different potential solutions.

[stradicat]

Can confirm, the issue is still present; the snap equivalent does not exhibit this behaviour.

When installed in Elementary OS 6, and given all filesystem access permissions to both system libraries and home folder, the message Symbol's value as variable is void: \213 still pops up, and initialization stops.

[stradicat]

More information on the issue here:
syl20bnr/spacemacs#11585

Could it be a Spacemacs-specific bug, or does it happen to everybody else using a vanilla or self-cobbled configuration?

[LeifAndersen]

I think this is beecause flatpak is on emacs 28, while spacemacs seems to only work on 27. If you revert to version 27.2 of emacs, it works fine:

flatpak update --commit=84827e2ccdedc3e31516319d91c6a12ff8f1a6dcc048e76dee9d123c8fb229f1 org.gnu.emacs

Note that:

1. the aspell program still doesn't work, (can't find any dictionaries) so you won't get spell check unless you manually add some, and
2. You will need root to run this command, as well as constantly making sure not to upgrade emacs to the latest version until spacemacs works with it.