Emacs 28.1 hangs up with Emacs Speaks Statistics (ESS) package in Fedora 36

Question

My Fedora 36 upgraded Emacs to version 28.1. today, and Emacs no longer starts up. Emacs gets stuck displaying message saying it is loading site-start/ess-init.el. Furthermore, Emacs spawns a bunch of other emacs processes, say 10, and nothing happens until the system runs out of resources.

Any idea of why this happens?

I have found out the following:

• The only line in ess-init.el is

  (require 'ess-site)
  

• The package providing ess-site.el is emacs-ess-18.10.2-6.fc36.noarch, which comes with the system.
• File ess-site.el has a byte-compiled version, which seems to be for Emacs v23:

  sh-5.1$ pwd
  /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/ess
  sh-5.1$ ls -l ess-site.el*
  -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 4812 Nov 10  2018 ess-site.el
  -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 1869 Jan 20 03:57 ess-site.elc
  sh-5.1$ file ess-site.elc
  ess-site.elc: Emacs/XEmacs v23 byte-compiled Lisp data
  

• Removing ESS from the system removes the issue.

Edit: According to Emacs manual, byte compilation for older version of Emacs should not be be an issue if the older version is "recent," whatever that may mean:

In general, any version of Emacs can run byte-compiled code produced by recent earlier versions of Emacs, but the reverse is not true. 

Answer 1

There appear to be one or more bugs with emacs' add on packages on Fedora. The Fedora project uses the Red Hat Bugzilla system for tracking bugs. Information about this particular issue can be tracked in bug 2108993 at bugzilla.redhat.com