One refinement I'd suggest is that if the transient page is edited,
its transient contents are evaluated and used as the initial
content for the edit box; after that, it'd become a static page. --[[smcv]]
+
+--------------------------
+
+[[!template id=gitbranch branch=smcv/transient author="[[smcv]]"]]
+[[!tag patch]]
+
+I had a look at implementing this. It turns out to be harder than I thought
+to have purely in-memory pages (several plugins want to be able to access the
+source file as a file), but I did get this proof-of-concept branch
+to write tag and autoindex pages into an underlay.
+
+This loses the ability to delete the auto-created pages (although they don't
+clutter up git this way, at least), and a lot of the code in autoindex is
+probably now redundant, so this is probably not quite ready for merge, but
+I'd welcome opinions.
+
+Usage: set `tag_underlay` and/or `autoindex_underlay` to an absolute path,
+which you must create beforehand. I suggest *srcdir* + `/.ikiwiki/transient`.
+
+Refinements that could be made if this approach seems reasonable:
+
+* make these options boolean, and have the path always be `.ikiwiki/transient`
+* improve the `remove` plugin so it also deletes from this special underlay