+I'm a little concerned about one aspect of the `%wikistate` variable that was just introduced.
+I think global state for each plugin is a fine idea, but I worry about making it persist across
+rebuilds. (And by rebuild, I assume we're talking about the `--rebuild` option.)
+
+My reasoning is that a 'rebuild' should be similar to checking out a new copy of the wiki
+and building. Another way of saying this is that all permanent state should be in the RCS.
+It is great that there is temporary state stored in other places - I think of it as indexing
+and caching. I'm worried that with the persistence, plugin writers will start putting data
+there that isn't backed by the RCS and that will break IkiWiki's great abilities as a
+distributed wiki.
+
+[[Will]]
+
+> Well, if you look at state that already persists across rebuilds, we have
+> pagectime, which can be extracted from RCS only very slowly in many
+> cases. There's also the separate state stored by the aggregate plugin,
+> which is indeed independant of the RCS, and can in some cases not be
+> replecated by rebuilding a different checkout (if the data is gone from
+> the feeds). Then there's the session cookie database, and the user
+> database, which started out with a lot of local state, has been
+> whittled down by removing admin prefs and subscriptions, but still has
+> important state including password hashes.
+>
+> So while I take your point about the potential for abuse,
+> there's certianly legitimate reasons to need to store data across
+> rebuilds. And plugins have always been able to drop their own files in
+> wikistatedir as aggregate does and have it persist, so the abuse
+> potential has always been there, the barrier has been lowered only
+> slightly.
+>
+> OTOH, if something can be added to the documentation that encourages
+> good behavior, that'd be a good thing ... --[[Joey]]
+
+---
+
+I would find this page clearer split up into sub-pages. Does anyone agree/disagree? -- [[users/Jon]]