I just upgraded Org mode to version 8.0.6. I’ve been holding off waiting for org2blog to fix some incompatibilities. Mostly, the transition went smoothly. By following the commentary in the release notes and the new installation instructions I had everything working reasonably quickly. I thought.
Everything was fine until I tried to rebuilt my agenda. The first time I tried it I got a message saying that org-agenda-archives-mode had a void value. I turned to the manual to see what I needed to do but I could find no mention of this variable in the index or any of the appropriate areas in the body of the manual. Nor could I find anything in the release notes. What to do?
Well, of course, Emacs is famously self documenting so I just looked up the variable with 【Ctrl+h v】 and saw that I could set it to nil and get the behavior I wanted. I tried to build the agenda again and got another error message. This time I just went directly to the built-in manual to figure out the right value. This happened a total of 3 times but after the first I was able to resolve the problems quickly. The TL;DR is that I just added
(setq org-agenda-archives-mode nil) (setq org-agenda-skip-comment-trees nil) (setq org-agenda-skip-function nil)
to my init.el and everything was fine.
It’s sometimes easy to forget the power of the built-in documentation. Instead of wasting time looking at the Org manual, all I had to do was look up the problem variables.