What I wanted

I thought to myself it would be nice to see from the console the dates that my ikiwiki blog posts were published. Especially as I would like to know the order of my todo list without having to view the webpage.

What I discovered

Looked at the code and saw the functions for grabbing the ctime from git but couldn't reconcile them to the "Posted" date in the RSS feed. Some more reading and I figured out that the Posted time is taken from the UNIX ctime when first uploaded into the repository and this information is stored in the page state via a Perl storable database - indexdb. (I'm sure most know this but to be clear in UNIX ctime is not the actual creation time of a file. UNIX has no facility for recording the actual creation time - however on first upload to the wiki it's good enough).

Wrote a Perl script to query and sort indexdb. Now I can list my todos or blog posts in the order they appear on the web. Handy.

However the ikiwiki state is specifically excluded via '.gitignore'. I work a lot on trains and not having this file in my cloned wiki means I can't list published posts or my todos in the proper order. I can get an approximation from git logs but, dam it, I want it the same!

What can I do?

Is it a spectacularly bad idea to include the ikiwiki state file in my cloned repo (I suspect it is). What else could be done? Can I disable pagestate somehow or force ikiwiki to always use git commit times for Posted times?

Have you tried running ikiwiki with the --gettime option on your laptop, to force it to retrieve initial commit times from git? You should only need to do that once, and it'll be cached in the pagestate thereafter.

Because that functionality is slow on every supported VCS except git, ikiwiki tries to avoid using it unless it's really needed. rcs lists it as "fast" for git, though, so depending how fast it really is and how large your wiki is, you might be able to get away with running ikiwiki with --gettime all the time? --smcv