I want to document the resolution of this problem so it may help a
future reader. Thanks to Adam's read_bdsk_file.py I was able to fix
the problem in a minute once I knew what the problem was. My original
mail describing the problem is copied at the end of this message.
Summary of problem : I have two identical Macs with identical set up
of the bib file and the PDF files it refers to. The links work on one
Mac but not the other.
Probable cause : The working copy of my subversion repository is
called svn. On one of my machines I had moved it to svn.old before
installing a fresh working copy called svn. This was done while
BibDesk was running. So BibDesk updated the links to svn.old. This bib
file was checked in and when checked out on the second machine, had
links naturally pointing to svn.old. The first machine still has the
svn.old directory so links were working fine.
Resolution : Adam's script was the key. His script told me that the
links in BibDesk on the second (broken links) machine were pointing to
something like :
svn.old/file.pdf
But of course there was no svn.old on the second machine. With BibDesk
running I moved svn directory to svn.old. Then I clicked in BibDesk
and made sure I was able to see the files linked through it. Then I
moved svn.old to svn and clicked in BibDesk again so links were
pointing to svn. Then I saved it and committed the new .bib file.
The links are now working fine.
Thanks to all who offered their help and scripts and specially to Adam
for his Python script.
In retrospect, the very first solution offered (which mentioned that
moving the files to Trash can make this happen) would have helped, had
I generalized it to what actually happened.
Regards
Anil
On Jul 14, 2010, at 6:04 AM, Adam R. Maxwell wrote:
> Try running this Python script with one of the problematic Bdsk-
> File-1 fields as input:
>
> http://homepage.mac.com/amaxwell/.cv/amaxwell/Sites/.Public/read_bdsk_file.py-zip.zip
>
> That should tell you what your .bib file links point to.
>
My original mail about the problem details :
>> I'd like to find out how to debug the problem I am seeing. To
>> summarize : I have two identical Macs with identical set up of the
>> bib
>> file and the PDF files it refers to. The links work on one Mac but
>> not
>> the other.
>>
>> Details :
>>
>> I have two identical Macs, each with a working copy of my SVN
>> respoitory. The bib file and the PDF files it links to are all in the
>> repository. The relative and absolute locations of the bib file and
>> the PDF files are IDENTICAL on the 2 Macs. Because the papers
>> directory is very large, and one of the Macs is on a slower internet
>> connection, I made a tarball of the papers from one and brought it on
>> a USB disk to the other Mac. Then I untarred it on the location where
>> SVN would have put it. Now an svn update shows that the working copy
>> is up to date and identical to the repository hence to the other Mac.
>> The bib file is literally identical on both Macs since it is
>> downloaded from the SVN repository and to make sure, I have checked
>> with diff. The PDF files directory is literally identical because it
>> is a tar copy of the other. The permissions, even the change dates of
>> the PDF files are identical. For the last 5 years, before I had to
>> redo the working copies, the links used to work on both Macs. At that
>> time the PDF files had been downloaded from SVN directly even on the
>> slower internet Mac.
>>
>> Why do the links now work on one Mac and not on the other ?
>>
>> There are 1500 entries so I can't repair those by hand. In any case I
>> don't want to then break the links on the other Mac. The PDF files
>> have grown in number over the years and I can't download from the
>> repository on the slow internet Mac -- it would just take too long.
>>
>> I would like to find out how to debug this strange problem. Is
>> there a
>> debug mode in Bibdesk that I can turn on ? Otherwise, knowing more
>> about how the linking in Bibdesk works may help me figure this out.
>
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