[part.solved] Re: records mode: error getting TODOs

[Erich.Waelde@t-online.de (Erich Waelde)]

Hello again,

Erich Waelde writes:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> anyone out there using records successfully ?
> 
> 
> I'm using 
>   ii  emacs21          21.3+1-4       The GNU Emacs editor
>   ii  records-gnuemacs 1.4.9-3        Save and index notes in Emacs environment
>   ii  records-common   1.4.9-3        Save and index notes in Emacs environment
> 
> 
> I create a record and include a TODO in the body (as suggested in the info
> pages) in today's record file, say.
> 
> The next day I 'records-goto-today' and press 'C-c / g' to trigger the
> function 'records-get-todo' (defined in records-util.el).
> 
> It will fetch the subject of the record with the TODO item from yesterday
> correctly, but will fail to get the TODO item itself.
> 
> *Messages* says:
>   Wrote /home/ew/records/index
>   Wrote /home/ew/records/dindex
>   Symbol's value as variable is void: current-pre­fix-arg
> 
<snip>


Someone pointed out offlist, that it should be
'prefix' rather than 'pre-fix' (note the '-')
However, find'ing /usr/share/emacs* and /etc/emacs* did not find a file
with that particular misspell.

So I turned back to sources. Here is what I did:

1.  download records-1.5.0.tar.gz from
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/records 

    as indicated in the bug reports on that site, the tar ball is
    incomplete. So I downloaded
      recordsadmin.in
      records-vars.el.in
    from online cvs
    http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/records/records/ 

2.  umpacked all this into ~/emacs/records-1.5.0

3.  cd ~/emacs/records-1.5.0
    ./configure
    make
    chmod 755 recordsadmin

    I did _not_ install at this point.

4.  clean out the old stuff
    cd ~
    mv records records.old
    mv .emacs-records .emacs-records.old
    ./emacs/records-1.5.0/recordsadmin -i

5.  *edit* .emacs-records to point to that local directory
    . < (let ((f (expand-file-name "/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp")))
    . ---
    . > (let ((f (expand-file-name "/home/ew/emacs/records-1.5.0")))

6.  emacs --no-site-file --no-init-file

    within emacs "load-file" ~/.emacs-records
    call records-goto-today
    goto previous day
    create record including a TODO item
    save record
    goto next day (== today again)
    'C-c / g' , get-todos

    and yapp, the TODO lines appear. No error message! :-)


Conclusions:

- this is not a solution, but a workaround
- the 1.5.0 tar ball is incomplete
- when carefully separating old (1.4.9) and new (1.5.0) stuff,
  the problem reported above does not occur.

I decided to let the debian maintainer know this stuff, too, so
possibly a new package can be made.

Cheers,
Erich