[[!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).
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.
