[O] list of agenda files in a file

[hymie!]

Greetings.

I'd like to add my _archive files to my agenda.  I don't need the entries
clogging up my day-to-day .org files, but I want the items to still
appear in my agenda.

I found this in the org manual:

>The information to be shown is normally collected from all agenda files,
>the files listed in the variable org-agenda-files[98].
>
>[98] If the value of that variable is not a list, but a single file name,
>then the list of agenda files will be maintained in that external file.

So based on that, I put this in my .emacs file:
  (setq org-agenda-files (quote ("~/org/agenda.file.list")))
but I cannot seem to get this to work.

When that file has a plain old list of filenames in it, I get an error
Agenda file ~/org/agenda.file.list is not in `org-mode'

When that file is empty, then there is nothing in my agenda.  I then
tried using C-c [ to add a file to the list, and I end up with
 '(org-agenda-files (quote ("~/org/file.org" "~/org/agenda.file.list")))
in my .emacs file.

Am I misunderstanding?  The manual sounds like I can maintain a file
that contains a list of files that the agenda should use.  But I can't
seem to make that happen, either automatically or manually.

What am I doing wrong?

--hymie!    http://lactose.homelinux.net/~hymie    address@hidden