org-mobile-push vs. symlinks

[James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com>]

Sorry for resending as a new thread. I had wanted to reply to my
original message on gmane, but gmane's search fails to locate the
thread (?).

Anyway, I still don't understand the rationale for the current
behavior. Does anyone know why org-mobile-push resolves the agenda
files' names to symlink targets?

Thanks,
hjh


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 11:42 AM
Subject: org-mobile-push vs. symlinks

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, when I sync captures back to the computer, org-mobile-pull opens a
buffer for semester-fall.org, but it's empty because there is no file
by that name under org-directory -- so, 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


-- 
James Harkins /// dewdrop world
jamshark70@dewdrop-world.net
http://www.dewdrop-world.net

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