How to fix the "file-missing: Doing vfork" error in Emacs

Introduction

Sometimes when I am playing around with Doom Emacs modules, running doom sync, or changing plugins, I breaking things. That is fine, worst case, I delete my config folder ans start over, nothign lost but some time. But lately I faced the following error message after restarting Emacs:

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(file-missing Doing vfork No such file or directory)

According to this GitHub issue this is a macOS issue, but well…I am on Linux. The error still comes up, so I want to document the solution I have found.

Solution

With extended debug tracing ¹, we can see that the error actually comes from sqlite, and so there is one very helpful comment in the previously mentioned GitHub issue, that is mentioning just that:

I got this after upgrading from 28.1 to 28.2 (via emacs-mac on homebrew) and also incidentally upgraded from Monterey 12.5 to 12.6 at the same time — which had its own weirdness with clang not being found, but in my case it was emacsql-sqlite that was causing the issue (not found).

I did this to flush out old 28.1 stuff (not sure if it was necessary)

rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/.local

doom sync

And then manually compiled emacsql-sqlite

cd .emacs.d/.local/straight/build-28.2/emacsql-sqlite/sqlite make

Things seem to be working ok now.

So, yeah, it simply comes down to these steps:

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# Clean up first.
rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/.local

# Make sure, Doom is synced.
doom sync

# Go into the download directory (depends on you Emacs version).
cd .emacs.d/.local/straight/build-29.1/emacsql-sqlite/sqlite

# Manually rebuild the binary.
make

And with that it works again. I had the error multiple times in a row, but this solution fixes it everytime. Not sure what the source is, but now it is documented for future me and maybe it is helpful to somebody else coming from a search engine.

Notes