* make these options boolean, and have the path always be `.ikiwiki/transient`
* improve the `remove` plugin so it also deletes from this special underlay
+
+>> Perhaps it should be something more generic, so that other plugins could use it (such as "album" mentioned above).
+>> The `.ikiwiki/transient` would suit this, but instead of saying "tag_underlay" or "autoindex_underlay" have "use_transient_underlay" or something like that?
+>> Or to make it more flexible, have just one option "transient_underlay" which is set to an absolute path, and if it is set, then one is using a transient-underlay.
+>> --[[KathrynAndersen]]
+
+>>> What I had in mind was more like `tag_autocreate_transient => 1` or
+>>> `autoindex_transient => 1`; you might conceivably want tags to be
+>>> checked in but autoindices to be transient, and it's fine for each
+>>> plugin to make its own decision. Going from that to one boolean
+>>> (or just always-transient if people don't think that's too
+>>> astonishing) would be trivial, though.
+>>>
+>>> I don't think relocating the transient underlay really makes sense,
+>>> except for prototyping: you only want one, and `.ikiwiki` is as good
+>>> a place as any (ikiwiki already needs to be able to write there).
+>>>
+>>> For [[plugins/contrib/album]] I think I'd just make the photo viewer
+>>> pages always-transient - you can always make a transient page
+>>> permanent by editing it, after all.
+>>>
+>>> Do you think this approach has enough potential that I should
+>>> continue to hack on it? Any thoughts on the implementation? --[[smcv]]
+
+>>>> Ah, now I understand what you're getting at. Yes, it makes sense to put transient pages under `.ikiwiki`.
+>>>> I haven't looked at the code, but I'd be interested in seeing whether it's generic enough to be used by other plugins (such as `album`) without too much fuss.
+>>>> The idea of a transient underlay gives us a desirable feature for free: that if someone edits the transient page, it is made permanent and added to the repository.
+>>>>
+>>>> I think the tricky thing with removing these transient underlay pages is the question of how to prevent whatever auto-generated the pages in the first place from generating them again - or, conversely, how to force whatever auto-generated those pages to regenerate them if you've changed your mind.
+>>>> I think you'd need something similar to `will_render` so that transient pages would be automatically removed if whatever auto-generated them is no longer around.
+>>>> -- [[KathrynAndersen]]