Php-extras error: wrong-type arguement stringp nil

[zeka0]

I got an error when start up the spacemacs. It seems to be unable to contact the gnu repository. I have tried to use VPN to connect to USA LA but it reports the same problem. My platform is win10-64bit-home and I have added git(2.6.4.windows.1) to my environment path. Maybe putting that package in local versions of those packages will help?

[StreakyCobra]

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/elpa.gnu.org

It's not just you! http://elpa.gnu.org looks down from here.

[jgertm]

It seems to be back up again, thus it works fine again.
It does seem like a problem to me that while any of the repositories are unreachable it's impossible to start spacemacs. Is there a way to disable checking them on every start?

[StreakyCobra]

@jgertm Indeed it's annoying. Have you tried changing dotspacemacs-check-for-update to nil?

[zeka0]

Well, it seems that http://elpa.gnu.org has been up. But I still have that problem: Php-extras error: wrong-type arguement stringp nil. But there are no message for unable to contact gnu.org this time. Any ideas?

[zeka0]

Okay, it seems that disable the php layer in spacemacs would eliminate this problem. As I'm not a php-user, it works for me. For those who use php, there might be a headache now...

[drew887]

Was there ever a solution found for this? elpa is up and accessable for me, but I'm still having the wrong-type-argument problem

[syl20bnr]

php-extras is fetched directly from github via a recipe. The gnu elpa repo issue should be unrelated. One can delete the quelpa cache in the .cache directory as well as the archives folder in elpa directory.

[drew887]

I tried deleting it a couple of times, and eventually looked at the files, they were full of weird symbols once downloaded (not a line endings thing I checked that) so I eventually"solved" it by commenting it out from the package list and just installing it from marmalade

[syl20bnr]

That's weird, if it happens again, can you paste the corrupted content of the file ?

[drew887]

Github seems to not be displaying the wierd character but heres an image from notepad++

[ventikus]

I have the same problem.

Found 6 new package(s) to install...
--> refreshing package archive: gnu... [3/3]
--> installing package: php-extras@php... [3/6]
An error occurred while installing php-extras (error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil))
--> installing package: phpunit@php... [6/6]

Im new to emacs and spacemacs so i don't have even idea what i'm supposed to post :D

[ubuntutest]

I also tried using spacemacs-develop, but I'm not able to solve the problem.
An error occurred while installing php-extras (error: (wrong-type-argument stringp nil))

i'm on windows 10,
any idea how to solve it?

[andrew-werdna]

I'm having the exact same issue

[arnested]

Hi, I'm the author of php-extras.

Just for the record. The "weird character" is a page break (ascii 12, ^L) and is not uncommon in elisp code. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1576887/what-does-l-in-emacs-lisp-source-code-mean

So I guess the problem must be something else.

Reading through some of the referenced issues suggests the problem is unrelated to php-extras and that a missing tar executable is the root cause.