emacs startup says "Invalid face: highlight"

Question

When I start up emacs, it prints Invalid face: highlight and then exits. This problem happened after I reinstalled Ubuntu 21.04 from scratch.

Any suggestions on how to debug this?

• I have tried 26.2 from ubuntu... same problem.
• I have tried downloading and compiling 27.2. Same problem.
• I have tried commenting out every line in my .emacs file. Same problem.
• emacs -q has the same problem.
• emacs -q --debug-init has the same problem.
• emacs -Q brings up an emacs window.

Answer 1

If the problem persists with emacs -q, and not for emacs -Q, then the source is most likely in site-start.el. site-start.el is sometimes provided by distributions, and you might find it in /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp, /etc/emacs/.

On Ubuntu, running the command locate site-start.el from the command line might show you other locations.

Any files in the directory/etc/emacs/site-start.d/ may be involved too.

Answer 2

I narrowed the problem down to a file in /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp: subdirs.el.

It contains

(if (fboundp 'normal-top-level-add-subdirs-to-load-path)
    (normal-top-level-add-subdirs-to-load-path))

instead of the following which is in the source for emacs 27.2:

;; In load-path, after this directory should come
;; certain of its subdirectories.  Here we specify them.
(normal-top-level-add-to-load-path '("vc" "url" "textmodes" "progmodes" "play" "org" "nxml" "net" "mh-e" "mail" "leim" "language" "international" "gnus" "eshell" "erc" "emulation" "emacs-lisp" "cedet" "calendar" "calc"  "obsolete"))
;; Local Variables:
;; version-control: never
;; no-byte-compile: t
;; no-update-autoloads: t
;; End: