I'd like a way to always ask the RCS (Git) to update a file's mtime in refresh mode. This is currently only done on the first build, and later for --gettime --rebuild. But always rebuilding is too heavy-weight for this use-case. My options are to either manually set the mtime before refreshing, or to have ikiwiki do it at command. I used to do the former, but would now like the latter, as ikiwiki now generally does this timestamp handling.

From a quick look, the code in IkiWiki/Render.pm:find_new_files is relevant: if (! $pagemtime{$page}) { [...].

How would you like to tackle this?

--tschwinge

This could be done via a needsbuild hook. The hook is passed the list of changed files, and it should be safe to call rcs_getmtime and update the pagemtime for each.

That lets the feature be done by a plugin, which seems good, since rcs_getmtime varies between very slow and not very fast, depending on VCS.

AFAICS, the only use case for doing this is if you commit changes and then delay pushing them to a DVCS repo. Since then the file mtime will be when the change was pushed, not when it was committed. But I've generally felt that recording when a change was published to the repo of a wiki as its mtime is good enough. --Joey