Error encountered when adding melpa to package-archives

Question

I'm using emacs 25.2.1 (built from source). A strange problem happened after I tried to configure it for editing tex files.

The suspicious config file content is listed below.

(require 'package)

(add-to-list 'package-archives
         '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)

(package-initialize)

(provide 'init-melpa)

Then I load it in init.el with (require 'init-melpa)

I'm using that since emacs 24.5 and it was working before I installed auctex, company-auctex... Now I've uninstalled those new packages but I am still having the following error (error dumped using --debug-init).

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument listp [(20111019 1600) nil "implementation of a hash table whose key-value pairs expire" single ((:commit . "7499586b6c8224df9f5c5bc4dec96b008258d580"))])

  package--add-to-archive-contents([(20111019 1600) nil "implementation of a hash table whose key-value pairs expire" single ((:commit . "7499586b6c8224df9f5c5bc4dec96b008258d580"))] "melpa")

  package-read-archive-contents("melpa")

  package-read-all-archive-contents()

  package-initialize()

  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*-196816> nil "/home/max/.emacs.d/init/init-melpa.el" nil t)  ; Reading at buffer position 297
  load-with-code-conversion("/home/max/.emacs.d/init/init-melpa.el" "/home/max/.emacs.d/init/init-melpa.el" nil t)

  #<subr require>(init-melpa nil nil)

  ad-Advice-require(#<subr require> init-melpa)

  apply(ad-Advice-require #<subr require> init-melpa)

  require(init-melpa)

  eval-buffer(#<buffer  *load*> nil "/home/max/.emacs.d/init.el" nil t)  ; Reading at buffer position 2536
  load-with-code-conversion("/home/max/.emacs.d/init.el" "/home/max/.emacs.d/init.el" t t)

  load("/home/max/.emacs.d/init" t t)

  #[0 "\205\266

It looks like the package-archives is damaged as I tried to add melpa though:

(custom-set-variabales 
  '(package-archives
   (quote
    (("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
     ("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/")))))

However I still have same errors.

Please help! Any advice is appreciated!

Desperate,

Max

Answer 1

MELPA sometimes delivers junk when asked for an archives file. If you run into this, just delete the MELPA-specific archives file (located at ~/.emacs.d/elpa/archives/melpa/archive-contents) and recreate it on the next Emacs launch with M-x package-refresh-contents.

Answer 2

Alright, Finally found the solution.

Changing "melpa" to a whatever name such as "meplas" helped to solve it.

I still would like to know what caused the problem.