[[!tag wishlist]]
Continuing the ideas in [[bugs/Inline doesn't wikilink to pages]].
I thought of a use case for another feature: making [[ikiwiki/directive/inline]] inherit the link relations of the included pages (optionally, say, with inheritlinks=yes). For example, if I want to list elements/* that have been linked to in any of new_stuff/*, I could try to write a [[ikiwiki/pagespec]] like
elements/* and backlink(new_stuff/*).
This is not yet possible, as discussed in [[todo/tracking_bugs_with_dependencies]].
It would be possible to work around this limitation of pagespecs if it was possible to create a page all_new_stuff with \[[!inline pages="new_stuff/*" inheritlinks=yes]]: then the desired pagespec would be expressed as elements/* and backlink(all_new_stuff).
Or, instead of specifying whether to inherit at the place of the inline, add more relations (inline, backinline) and relation composition (say, *, or haskell-ish $ in order not confuse with the glob *) and explicitly write in the pagespecs that you want to follow the inline relation backwards: elements/* and backlink$backinline(all_new_stuff) or, equivalently, if [["classes"|todo/tracking_bugs_with_dependencies]] are implemented in pagespecs: elements/* and backlink(backinline(all_new_stuff)). Of course, this suggestion requires the powerful extension to pagespecs, but it gives more flexibility, and the possibility to avoid redundant information: the same pagespec at two places -- the inline and the other matching construction.
BTW, adding more relations -- the inline relation among them -- would satisfy [[the other feature request|bugs/Inline doesn't wikilink to pages]]. --Ivan Z.
This is not just an ugly workaround. The availability of this feature has some reason: the classes of pages you want to refer to "recursively" (in that kind of complex pagespecs) tend to have some meaning themselves. So, I might indeed want to have a page like all_new_stuff, it would be useful for me. And at the same time I would like to write pagespecs like elements/* and backlink(all_new_stuff) -- and using the proposed feature in [[todo/tracking_bugs_with_dependencies/]] would be less clean because then I would have to enter the same information at two places: the possibly complex pagespec in the inline. And having redundant information leads to inconsistency.
So in a sense, in some or most cases, it would indeed be cleaner to "store" the definition of a class of pages referred to in complex pagespecs as a separate object. And the most natural representation for this definition of a class of pages (adhering to the principle of wiki that what you mean is entered/stored in its most natural representation, not through some hidden disconnected code) is making a page with an inline/map/or the like, so that at the same time you store the definition and you see what it is (the set of pages is displayed to you).
I would actually use it in my current "project" in ikiwiki: I actually edit a set of materials as a set of subpages new_stuff/*, and I also want to have a combined view of all of them (made through inline), and at another page, I want to list what has been linked to in new_stuff/* and what hasn't been linked to.--Ivan Z.
I see where you're coming from, but let's think about
immplementation efficiency for a second.
In order for inline inheritlinks=yes to work,
the inline directive would need to be processed
during the scan pass.
When the directive was processed there, it would need
to determine which pages get inlined (itself a moderatly
expensive operation), and then determine which pages
each of them link to. Since the scan pass is unordered,
those pages may not have themselves been scanned yet.
So to tell what they link to, inline would have to load
each of them, and scan them.
So there's the potential for this to slow
down a wiki build by about a factor of 2.
--[[Joey]]
