I think it's probably some configuration setting or package that I've installed that's somehow interfering with the functioning of package-install, but I'm having a hard time parsing the backtrace

AIUI the exception (I think that's what signal means here?) occurs in a byte-complied package, package.el

(That's why, sadly, there are no line numbers here)

Something is expected to be a string, but isn't

But I don't know what

(require . package)

Is that "dotted pair notation" for cons cells? What does that have to do with anything??

In any case, the problem appears to be in the function

package--with-response-buffer-1

I just tried with a near-empty init.el, and the error still appears!

which version of emacs?

emacs 28.1

But I swear I've seen this in older versions as well, as far back as a couple of years ago

odd

Hm, I just saw that package-refresh-contents also fails

Contacting host: 
Package refresh done
Failed to download 'melpa' archive.

This is all of my init.el

(require 'package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives '("melpa" . "") t)
(package-initialize)

maybe some emacs update that re-uses some outdated code from the load-path or something

difficult to say, but that smells like something that could happen

Is there some cache I could delete?

I would say reinstall emacs

Aha, now it feels like I'm getting somwhere. I deleted .emacs.d, now it seems to be working

and ensure you don't have anything in previous locations of the current load-path

before you reinstall

Something about my .emacs.d must be causing this

did you try to load emacs without loading the conf at all and just eval the code you mentioned?

Probably something erroneous in custom.el

let met try emacs -Q

OK so it works with -Q, but breaks without -Q

you can try to reduce the scope by trying no-site-list and no-site-file

-Q combines these 2 and others

Ok, great suggestion. So it really is --no-init-file

The crazy thing is this happens even if the init.el is empty

I distilled it down to installing a package from GNU elpa, so I don't even have to add MELPA to repro the problem

> Probably something erroneous in custom.el

but I don't have a custom.el - maybe I'm not understanding?

I just started from a completely empty .emacs.d

No idea then

It also works if I delete .emacs.d/elpa before installing stuff

OK here's a description of the error, and the workaround described fixes the problem https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/flb0vc/comment/g13izoy/

So the problem seems to be with certain macos builds of emacs. I upgraded to the latest Emacsformacos build 28.2 and that also seems to fix the issue, no editing up loadup.el necessary

But wow, what a weird problem

Thanks for the help @U043RSZ25HQ @U050SC7SV

Documented here https://gist.github.com/pesterhazy/0612322028ef92d109769616cf80b661