>> I've made may not be acceptable, though -- I'd appreciate someone providing
>> some feedback on that hunk!
+>>> Well, re that hunk, taint checking is currently disabled, but
+>>> if the perl bug that disallows it is fixed and it is turned back on,
+>>> the hash values will remain tainted, which will probably lead to
+>>> problems.
+>>>
+>>> I'm also leery of using such a complex data structure in config.
+>>> The websetup plugin would be hard pressed to provide a UI for such a
+>>> data structure. (It lacks even UI for a single hash ref yet, let alone
+>>> a list.)
+>>>
+>>> Also, it seems sorta wrong to have two so very different syntaxes to
+>>> represent the same meta data. A user without a lot of experience will
+>>> be hard pressed to map from a directive to this in the setup file.
+>>>
+>>> All of which leads me to think the setup file could just contain
+>>> a text that could hold meta directives. Which generalizes really to
+>>> a text that contains any directives, and is, perhaps appended to the
+>>> top of every page. Which nearly generalizes to the sidebar plugin,
+>>> or perhaps something more general than that...
+>>>
+>>> However, excessive generalization is the root of all evil, so
+>>> I'm not necessarily saying that's a good idea. Indeed, my memory
+>>> concerns below invalidate this idea pretty well. --[[Joey]]
+
diff --git a/IkiWiki/Plugin/meta.pm b/IkiWiki/Plugin/meta.pm
index 6fe9cda..2f8c098 100644
--- a/IkiWiki/Plugin/meta.pm
>> are only relevant to defined fields that you wouldn't want to specify a
>> global default for anyway.
>>
+>>> I generally agree with this. It is *possible* that meta would have a new
+>>> field added, that takes parameters and make sense to use globally.
+>>> --[[Joey]]
+>>
>> Due to this, and the added complexity of the second patch (having to adjust
>> `IkiWiki/Setup.pm`), I think the first patch makes more sense. I've thus
>> reverted to it here.
+>>
+>> Is this merge-worthy?
diff --git a/IkiWiki/Plugin/meta.pm b/IkiWiki/Plugin/meta.pm
index b229592..3132257 100644
* title
-- [[Jon]]
+
+>>> Merry Christmas/festive season/happy new year folks. I've been away from
+>>> ikiwiki for the break, and now I've returned to watching recentchanges.
+>>> Hopefully I'll be back in the mix soon, too. In the meantime, Joey, have
+>>> you had a chance to look at this yet? -- [[Jon]]
+
+>>>> Ping :) Hi. [[Joey]], would you consider this patch for the next
+>>>> ikiwiki release? -- [[Jon]]
+
+>>> For this to work with websetup and --dumpsetup, it needs to define the
+>>> `meta_*` settings in the getsetup function.
+>>>>
+>>>> I think this will be problematic with the current implementation of this
+>>>> patch. The datatype here is an array of hash references, with each hash
+>>>> having a variable (and arbitrary) number of key/value pairs. I can't
+>>>> think of an intuitive way of implementing a way of editing such a
+>>>> datatype in the web interface, let alone registering the option in
+>>>> getsetup.
+>>>>
+>>>> Perhaps a limited set of defined meta values could be exposed via
+>>>> websetup (the obvious ones: author, copyright, license, etc.) -- [[Jon]]
+>>>
+>>> I also have some concerns about both these patches, since both throw
+>>> a lot of redundant data at meta, which then stores it in a very redundant
+>>> way. Specifically, meta populates a per-page `%metaheaders` hash
+>>> as well as storing per-page metadata in `%pagestate`. So, if you have
+>>> a wiki with 10 thousand pages, and you add a 1k site-wide license text,
+>>> that will bloat the memory usage of ikiwiki by in excess of 2
+>>> megabytes. It will also cause ikiwiki to write a similar amount more data
+>>> to its state file which has to be loaded back in each
+>>> run.
+>>>
+>>> Seems that this could be managed much more efficiently by having
+>>> meta special-case the site-wide settings, not store them in these
+>>> per-page data structures, and just make them be used if no per-page
+>>> metadata of the given type is present. --[[Joey]]
+>>>>
+>>>> that should be easy enough to do. I will work on a patch. -- [[Jon]]