Re: [O] Bug: wrong-type-argument when changing TODO state [7.7]

[Nick Dokos]

Stelian Iancu <address@hidden> wrote:

> >
> > Then start up an emacs without any of your customizations, load the 
> > minimal.emacs
> > file and visit an org file and try what you tried before:
> >
> >   emacs -q -l /path/to/minimal.emacs /path/to/somefile.org
> >
> > and try changing a TODO as before.  Does that work?
> 
> Tried this one and indeed, it works now. Looking at the
> org-todo-line-regexp variable I can see it's no longer reported nil.
> 
> > If not, try -Q
> > instead of -q: does *that* work?
> >
> > Assuming one of these works, then you have localized the problem to
> > some customization (yours or the systems) and then there are various
> > ways to proceed.
> >
> 
> So it is a customization issue. Now the question is what :-). I should
> mention that I am using both dev versions for Emacs and org-mode
> (Emacs from bzr from a few days ago and org-mode from git from a few
> days ago) on Mac OS X 10.7. Emacs is installed using homebrew.
> 

Probably. The next step is to modify your .emacs (or whatever you use)
to do all the other stuff, except for the orgmode customizations and try
again. If it works, you keep introducing more and more stuff until it breaks.

My .emacs does things like this:

...
(require 'my-org-config)
...

and all the org config stuff is in a separate file, my-org-config.el which
ends with

(provide 'my-org-config)

That way I can whack large swaths of code in one swell foop (sic) by
just commenting out the (require ...) form in .emacs and replacing it
with a

(load-file "minimal.org.emacs")

but even if you don't have it organized like this, you can still follow
the steps.

Always keep the minimal stuff that is necessary to get org-mode loaded.
Then bisect your way through your org config: throw away the bottom half
temporarily and try with just the top half. If that works, add some
(roughly half) of the stuff you threw away and try again. If it doesn't,
try with the bottom half only. And keep doing it until you find the
culprit.

The most important thing is to be systematic, but also aware of what you
are doing. You have to choose your bisection points with some care. But
bisection is a very effective way to find such problems.

There have been many discussions of such bisections on this list in the
past. You might want to search the list for more suggestions.

Nick