Re: proposal to make null string handling more emacs-y

[Jeremiah Dodds]

Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:

> Jeremiah Dodds <address@hidden> writes:
>>>> and the downside is that some user is sitting there unable to start
>>>> Emacs because two required packages -- packages that may be used only
>>>> on demand or not at all -- are arguing over some runtime value.
>>>> That's a big downside.
>>>
>>> WTF do you keep going on about Emacs startup?
>>
>> I believe this is because it seems that the "uh-oh i got a nil when I
>> expected a string" error commonly happens on emacs startup, confusing
>> new users, presumably after loading some big bunch of elisp.
>
> Does it?  I don't think I've _ever_ seen that error at startup (though
> I've certainly had errors during startup)...
>
> -miles

It's happened to me enough times over the course of the decade or so
that I've been using emacs to remember it. I know that the first few
times it happened, I was pretty green and got really confused for a
while. Nowadays, I know how to figure out wtf is going on.

Unfortunately I don't remember the specifics of what triggered the error
for any of the times I ran into the issue.