Re: Bug: Org exporter: broken-link errors can't be debugged with debug-on-error [9.3 (release_9.3 @ /usr/share/emacs/28.0.50/lisp/org/)]

[Kyle Meyer <kyle@kyleam.com>]

Dima Kogan writes:

> Hi. I'm using the org included with a very recent emacs built from git.
>
> I have a large project consisting of many .org files that I'm exporting
> to html. Somewhere there's a broken link, so when I export the project I
> get
>
>   user-error: Unable to resolve link: "figures/blahblahblah.svg"
>
> This doesn't tell me where the problem is, specifically, so to find out
> I
>
>   (setq debug-on-error t)
>
> and go again. But something about the org code is preventing the
> debugger from triggering on this. That really shouldn't be happening.
> This is an error that's causing the export to give up and quit, and the
> debugger should come up (when debug-on-error).

It's not Org specific; it's a default behavioral difference between
error and user-error:

,----[ C-h f user-error RET ]
| [...]
| In contrast with other errors, user errors normally do not cause
| entry to the debugger, even when ‘debug-on-error’ is non-nil.
| This can be overridden by ‘debug-ignored-errors’.
`----

> Also, it would be nice if the error message reported the source file and
> line number of the bad link.

That does sound helpful.  Completely guessing, but I would think the
source file but not the line number may be easily obtainable when the
org-link-broken error (later converted to a user-error) is signaled.

You may find setting org-export-with-broken-links to `mark' helpful for
locating the broken links, though it marks the broken links in the
output, so the results still need to be mapped back to the corresponding
source file.