+
+----
+
+I wonder what this program (ikiwiki-calendar) is useful for. Would not it be simpler to have the [[calendar|ikiwiki/directive/calendar]] directive generate the `archive_base/year/month.mdwn` files on the fly, as are the tag pages generated by the [[tag|plugins/tag]] plugin? This solution would have the advantage of automatically generating the right calendar pages, instead of having to tell ikiwiki-calendar which years to take into account.
+
+Using this solution would mean to have the pagespec stored somewhere in the configuration. But this is already the case, as the pagespec used by [[ikiwiki-calendar]] is either set in the configuration file of the wiki, or in the crontab or whatever script used to call ikiwiki-calendar.
+
+Having done this, the only purpose of ikiwiki-calendar would be to re-generate the wiki on a daily (or whatever frequency) basis, which can be done using ikiwiki instead of ikiwiki-calendar.
+
+Did I miss something? If I am right, I offer to write the necessary patch, copied and adapted from the tag plugin, to generate the pages `archive_base/year/month.mdwn` on the fly.
+
+-- Spalax
+
+> Good spotting, `ikiwiki-calendar` predates the `add_autofile` API used to
+> autocreate tag pages and was bolted in as an easy way to create calendar
+> pages.
+>
+> It would be possible to do that inside the caneldar plugin now. Although
+> some command would still need to be run on a daily (or weekly, or
+> monthly, or yearly..) basis to have it wake up and make the new calendar
+> pages and update the displayed current day from calendar directives.
+>
+> That last is, arguably, the real point of running ikiwiki-calendar in
+> a cron job. Of course all it really does is run `ikiwiki -setup foo
+> -refresh`. --[[Joey]]