I created a small test GWT application with project/applicationCreator
and everything worked as expected. The public directory contained my
HTML file.

If I move the HTML file to another directory and create a link for
public to the new directory I get a compiler error.

E.g.

** Compilation succeeds without directory link **

~/booking$ ./Booking-compile
Output will be written into ./www/com.brittanygites.Booking
Copying all files found on public path
Compilation succeeded

~/booking/src/com/brittanygites/public$ ls
dummy.html
~/booking/src/com/brittanygites/public$ mv dummy.html
~/dev/BookingClient/
~/booking/src/com/brittanygites/public$ cd ..
~/booking/src/com/brittanygites$ rmdir public
~/booking/src/com/brittanygites$ ln -s ~/dev/BookingClient/ public
~/booking/src/com/brittanygites$ ls public
dummy.html  getdata.php  index.php  JSON.php  json.sql

** Compilation fails using a directory link for public **

~/booking$ ./Booking-compile
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException:
String index out of range: -11
        at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1768)
        at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1735)
        at
com.google.gwt.dev.util.FileOracleFactory.indexFolder(FileOracleFactory.jav a:200)
        at
com.google.gwt.dev.util.FileOracleFactory.indexURL(FileOracleFactory.java:2 98)
        at
com.google.gwt.dev.util.FileOracleFactory.create(FileOracleFactory.java:430 )
        at
com.google.gwt.dev.cfg.ModuleDef.normalize(ModuleDef.java:332)
        at
com.google.gwt.dev.cfg.ModuleDefLoader.load(ModuleDefLoader.java:161)
        at
com.google.gwt.dev.cfg.ModuleDefLoader.loadFromClassPath(ModuleDefLoader.ja va:59)
        at com.google.gwt.dev.GWTCompiler.run(GWTCompiler.java:619)
        at com.google.gwt.dev.GWTCompiler.main(GWTCompiler.java:189)