Re: [BUG] org-create-file-search-functions and description [9.5.5 (release_9.5.5 @ /usr/share/emacs/29.0.50/lisp/org/)]

[Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com>]

Magnus Therning <magnus@therning.org> writes:

> The documenation on org-create-file-search-functions contains this 
> piece of text
>
>   A function in this hook may also use setq to set the variable 
>   description to provide a suggestion for the descriptive text to 
>   be used for this link when it gets inserted into an Org buffer 
>   with org-insert-link.
>
> This doesn't seem to be true though. I really would love for there 
> to be a way to influence the link description, but no matter what 
> the documentation should be corrected.
>
> For some more info look at 
> https://www.reddit.com/r/orgmode/comments/xmvtsy/orgcreatefilesearchfunctions_and_description/

Thanks for reporting!
Confirmed.

This is a regression after we switched to lexical binding, and after we
removed the apparently uninitialized `description' variable from
let-binding in `org-store-link'.

    a85b4cc5c64b1eb6b97f5d7843dd54eb0632ef91
    Author:     Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
    AuthorDate: Thu Mar 11 13:07:37 2021 -0500
    Commit:     Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>
    CommitDate: Sun Mar 14 17:54:17 2021 -0400
    
    Backport commit 7d0dc3183 from Emacs
    
    ...
    * lisp/ol.el (org-store-link):
    Remove always-nil variable `description`.

In order to make things work now with lexical binding, we need to create
a top-level defvar in ol.el, which is not nice since `description'
variable name is a bad name to define.

Interestingly, this issue has not been noticed for a long time and not
many users are probably making use of it.

Thus, we may as well take this opportunity and allow
`org-create-file-search-functions' to return a cons cell
("search term" . "description"). This will not require unintuitive
global variables.

WDYT?

-- 
Ihor Radchenko,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at https://orgmode.org/.
Support Org development at https://liberapay.com/org-mode,
or support my work at https://liberapay.com/yantar92