>> --[[Joey]]
>>> Yes. It's not entirely clear to me why that's there... --s
+
+>>>> Yeah, 2461ce0de6231bfeea4d98c86806cdbb85683297 doesn't really
+>>>> say, and I tend to assume that when I've written paranoid code
+>>>> it's there for a reason. I think that here the concern was that
+>>>> the file might be in some underlay that the user should not be able
+>>>> to affect by web edits. The `-f` check seems rather redundant,
+>>>> surely if it's in `%pagesources` ikiwiki has already verified it's
+>>>> safe. --[[Joey]]
+
+----
+
+[[!template id=gitbranch branch=smcv/ready/transient-rm author="[[Simon McVittie|smcv]]"]]
+
+Here's a branch. It special-cases the `$transientdir`, but in such a way
+that the special case could easily be extended to other locations where
+deletion should be allowed.
+
+It also changes `IkiWiki::prune()` to optionally stop pruning empty
+parent directories at the point where you'd expect it to (for instance,
+previously it would remove the `$transientdir` itself, if it turns out
+to be empty), and updates callers.
+
+The new `prune` API looks like this:
+
+ IkiWiki::prune("$config{srcdir}/$file", $config{srcdir});
+
+with the second argument optional. I wonder whether it ought to look
+more like `writefile`:
+
+ IkiWiki::prune($config{srcdir}, $file);
+
+although that would be either an incompatible change to internal API
+(forcing all callers to update to 2-argument), or being a bit
+inconsistent between the one-and two-argument forms. Thoughts?
+
+--[[smcv]]