org-mobile-push vs. symlinks

[James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com>]

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I had a problem with mobile org sync, which I finally tracked down to the
handling of symlinks in org-mobile-push.

Setup: I want to have a different file name for my school org file
depending on fall or spring semester, but I hoped to avoid changing
org-agenda-files once a semester. So I symlinked semester-fall.org to
~/Documents/mobileorg/semester.org.

It seems that org-mobile-push resolves the symlink to determine the
filename to drop into the online share. So MobileOrg knows about
semester-fall.org, but there is no file by that name in org-directory. So,
org-mobile-pull opens an empty buffer for semester-fall.org and, as it's
empty, of course the parent node can't be found.

My question: Is there a technical reason why org-mobile-push must use the
symlink target's filename, instead of the filename that actually lives
under org-directory? Other parts of the code assume the filename under
org-directory. I can think of two possibilities:

- One should not put symlinks into org-directory, or at least make sure the
symlink's name is the same as the target. If this is an intentional
limitation, it should be documented.

- Or, the symlink resolution is not actually necessary and it causes
problems. In that case, it's a bug that should be fixed.

Which is it? :-)

hjh

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