spacemacs forgets all customizations made through customize / org-customize

[tko]

Description

spacemacs forgets all customizations made through customize / org-customize

Reproduction guide 🪲

• Start Emacs
• Customize some options, say org-capture-templates or org-modules; remember to Apply and Save changes
• Restart Emacs
• (verify the customizations are present in dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings and the variables have expected values)
• Update Packages (best guess of triggering the problem)
• Restart Emacs

Observed behaviour: 👀 💔
The customizations have disappeared without a trace from custom-set-variables in dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings. Especially with complex variables like org-templates this may be a loss of non-trivial effort in fine tuning.

The only(?) variable left is package-selected-packages which seems completely redundant overall as spacemacs is managing the packages.

Expected behaviour: ❤️ 😄
Everything working as customized. No notable data loss.

System Info 💻

• OS: darwin
• Emacs: 25.3.3
• Spacemacs: 0.300.0
• Spacemacs branch: develop (rev. 6868551)
• Graphic display: t
• Distribution: spacemacs
• Editing style: vim
• Completion: helm
• Layers:

(helm emacs-lisp neotree
      (auto-completion :variables auto-completion-enable-help-tooltip t)
      (colors :variables colors-colorize-identifiers 'variables)
      dash docker
      (evil-goggles :variables evil-goggles-duration 0.1)
      (finance :variables ledger-default-date-format "%Y-%m-%d")
      git graphviz html imenu-list javascript lua
      (org :variables org-agenda-files
           '("~/org")
           org-enable-reveal-js-support t)
      (osx :variables osx-use-option-as-meta nil osx-right-option-as 'meta osx-right-command-as 'super)
      outshine
      (plantuml :variables plantuml-jar-path "/usr/local/Cellar/plantuml/1.2018.1/libexec/plantuml.jar")
      python react restclient rust shell-scripts sql syntax-checking typescript version-control yaml)

• System configuration features: NOTIFY ACL LIBXML2 ZLIB TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS

[smile13241324]

I can reproduce this issue on develop with emacs 25.3.1. After updating packages all customisations are gone, except the list of selected packages. For now I have no clue what could cause this behaviour, but it is pretty annoying for anyone using the old "emacs customisation" interface.

[kini]

What's "old" about the customize interface? Isn't it the recommended way of configuring most packages?

This seems like a really severe bug. It's already bitten me several times and is more than "pretty annoying" in my opinion. I'd appreciate it if my text editor did not delete my data!

[rpls]

I can reproduce this with emacs 25.3.2 on f1f8db0

[letheed]

Just moved to develop from stable and this is a severe bug. I have a back up of my dotspacemacs but still.

[magicBeast]

Any news on this - just found out about it when my custom templates all disappeared? :-(

[mtdaly]

I was able to reproduce this with gnu emacs 27.0.50 on develop: d912b54

[ksjogo]

Having the same problem on emacs develop and spacemacs develop, though I have a slightly different repro case.
It only happens, when a new package dependency is added to spacemacs and then I restart spacemacs. Not when using package-install while running.
I assume the package dependencies might be checked before custom is load and thus are not saved?

[ksjogo]

Some workaround: Add
(dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings)
Just below the custom blocks.
So:

(defun dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings ()
.......
)

(dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings)

[kini]

Thanks, that workaround seems to work for me.

[bmag]

Should be fixed by #11994. The workaround works in most cases, but in a case where a customized variable force loads a library it would cause an error (e.g. see #9736). The new fix should be safe.

For completeness, here's a repro guide for the bug:

• customize fill-column to 90 and save for future sessions (e.g. SPC SPC customize-variable RET fill-column RET)
• add ahg to dotspacemacs-additional-packages and delete its folder (if already installed) from elpa directory
• quit emacs
• tail -n 20 ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el
  • observe: output includes fill-column customization
• start emacs
• tail -n 20 ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el
  • observe: output doesn't include fill-column customization, the only setting is package-selected-packages
• quit emacs
• tail -n 20 ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el
  • observe: output doesn't include fill-column customization, the only setting is package-selected-packages, original customizations are lost.

Cause of the bug:

• spacemacs loads ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el and the original dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings function with the original custom settings, but doesn't call the function yet.
• spacemacs enables the advice to write custom settings into ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el
• spacemacs installs the new package, which triggers overwriting the custom settings in ~/.spacemacs.d/init.el. The original custom settings weren't loaded yet, so they are not written to the file.
• spacemacs loads the original custom settings by calling dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings

I solved the bug by moving "enable the advice" step to after dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings is called.

[syl20bnr]

Fix merged, please verify.

[tko]

I can verify customizations persisting through additional package update steps as bmag noted above #10504 (comment)

Starting with .spacemacs file with no customizations and going through the steps I get a dotspacemacs/emacs-custom-settings added in the file and its contents remain stable between restarts. Only fill-column is listed in the customizations; I'm not seeing package-selected-packages but I'd consider that appropriate as I haven't installed packages outside layers and dotspacemacs-additional-packages.

[github-actions]

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