Autoloading failed to define function calc-dispatch

Question

I'm not sure how it happened, but calc no longer works. Whenever I try to start it, I get:

Autoloading failed to define function calc-dispatch

It was working fine last week and I am using the built-in calc, so I have no idea what changed to prevent it from working. I ran lgrep on a copy of the calc directory searching for calc-dispatch and it found calc-dispatch just fine. Could my .elc files have gotten corrupted?

When I tried to recompile them, I got stuff like:

calc-fin.el:29:1:Error: Required feature `calc' was not provided

Answer 1

The issue was that calc's default calc-settings-file is called calc.el by default. When I saved my customizations, the calc.el in my .emacs.d directory clobbered the calc.el in /usr/share/emacs/lisp/calc/ because I have .emacs.d in my load path. Transfering the contents of that file to my init.el and deleting it fixed the issue. I emailed the maintainer about the issue and received a very prompt and thurough response explaining the problem.