+
+>> I think this suffers from two problems. Firstly, unless you are tracking git
+>> master in your existing wiki, there's the possibility that your plugin will
+>> not work with a more modern version of ikiwiki (or that it would benefit
+>> from using a newly added utility subroutine or similar).
+
+>>> Unlikely. I don't make changes to the plugin interface that break
+>>> existing plugins. (Might change non-exported `IkiWiki::` things
+>>> from time to time.) --[[Joey]]
+
+>> Second, sometimes I
+>> find that even writing a plugin can involve making minor changes outside of
+>> the plugin code (bug fixes, or moving functionality about). So, I think
+>> having some kind of environment built around a git checkout is best.
+>>
+>> However, this does not address the issue of the tedium writing/maintaining a
+>> setup file for testing things.
+>>
+>> I think I might personally benefit from a more consistent environment (I
+>> move from machine-to-machine frequently). -- [[Jon]]
+
+> If you set `libdir` to point to a checkout of ikiwiki's git repository,
+> it will override use of the installed version of ikiwiki, so ikiwiki will
+> immediatly use any changed or new `.pm` files (with the exception of
+> IkiWiki.pm), and you can use git to manage it all without an installation
+> step. If I am modifying IkiWiki.pm, I generally symlink it from
+> `/usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki.pm` to my git reporisitory. Granted, not ideal.
+>
+> I often use my laptop's local version of my personal wiki for testing.
+> It has enough stuff that I can easily test most things, and if I need
+> a test page I just dump test cases on the sandbox. I can make
+> any changes necessary during testing and then `git reset --hard
+> origin/master` to avoid publishing them.
+>
+> If the thing I'm testing involves templates, or underlays,
+> I will instead use ikiwiki's `docwiki.setup` for testing, modifying it as
+> needed, since it is preconfigured to use the templates and underlays
+> from ikiwiki's source repository.
+> --[[Joey]]
+
+> I work with Ikiwiki from the git checkout directory the following way.
+>
+> * instead of running ikiwiki, I wrote the following `mykiwiki` shell script,
+> that also allows me to use my custom lib-ifited multimarkdown:
+
+ #!/bin/sh
+
+ MMDSRC="$HOME/src/multimarkdown/lib"
+ IKIWIKISRC="$HOME/src/ikiwiki"
+ PLUGINS="$HOME/src/ikiplugins"
+
+ /usr/bin/perl -I"$MMDSRC" -I"$IKIWIKISRC/blib/lib" -I"$PLUGINS" "$IKIWIKISRC/ikiwiki.out" -libdir "$IKIWIKISRC" "$@"
+
+> * I also have an installed ikiwiki from Debian unstable, from which I only use the base wiki, so my `.setup` has the following configs:
+
+ # additional directory to search for template files
+ templatedir => '/home/oblomov/src/ikiwiki/templates',
+ # base wiki source location
+ underlaydir => '/usr/share/ikiwiki/basewiki',
+ # extra library and plugin directory
+ libdir => '/home/oblomov/src/ikiwiki',
+
+> Hope that helps --GB