1 I like the idea of [[tips/integrated_issue_tracking_with_ikiwiki]], and I do so on several wikis. However, as far as I can tell, ikiwiki has no functionality which can represent dependencies between bugs and allow pagespecs to select based on dependencies. For instance, I can't write a pagespec which selects all bugs with no dependencies on bugs not marked as done. --[[JoshTriplett]]
3 > I started having a think about this. I'm going to start with the idea that expanding
4 > the pagespec syntax is the way to attack this. It seems that any pagespec that is going
5 > to represent "all bugs with no dependencies on bugs not marked as done" is going to
6 > need some way to represent "bugs not marked as done" as a collection of pages, and
7 > then represent "bugs which do not link to pages in the previous collection".
9 > One way to do this would be to introduce variables into the pagespec, along with
10 > universal and/or existential [[!wikipedia Quantification]]. That looks quite complex.
12 > Another option would be go with a more functional syntax. The concept here would
13 > be to allow a pagespec to appear in a 'pagespec function' anywhere a page can. e.g.
14 > I could pass a pagespec to `link()` and that would return true if there is a link to any
15 > page matching the pagespec. This makes the variables and existential quantification
16 > implicit. It would allow the example requested above:
18 >> `bugs/* and !*/Discussion and !link(bugs/* and !*/Discussion and !link(done))`
20 > Unfortunately, this is also going to make the pagespec parsing more complex because
21 > we now need to parse nested sets of parentheses to know when the nested pagespec
22 > ends, and that isn't a regular language (we can't use regular expression matching for
25 > One simplification of that would be to introduce some pagespec [[shortcuts]]. We could
26 > then allow pagespec functions to take either pages, or named pagespec shortcuts. The
27 > pagespec shortcuts would just be listed on a special page, like current [[shortcuts]].
28 > (It would probably be a good idea to require that shortcuts on that page can only refer
29 > to named pagespecs higher up that page than themselves. That would stop some
30 > looping issues...) These shortcuts would be used as follows: when trying to match
31 > a page (without globs) you look to see if the page exists. If it does then you have a
32 > match. If it doesn't, then you look to see if a similarly named pagespec shortcut
33 > exists. If it does, then you check that pagespec recursively to see if you have a match.
34 > The ordering requirement on named pagespecs stops infinite recursion.
36 > Does that seem like a reasonable first approach?
40 > One quick further thought. All the above discussion assumes that 'dependency' is the
41 > same as 'links to', which is not really true. For example, you'd like to be able to say
42 > "This bug does not depend upon [ [ link to other bug ] ]" and not have a dependency.
43 > Without having different types of links, I don't see how this would be possible.