But not even the symlink solution works, since I have only two choices, specify relative to the ikiwiki page, or relative to the absolute webdomain root. I need to specify from wiki root :( for example the link publicfiles/ will not as I thought link always to wikiroot/publicfiles , but rather link to publicfiles in the level of the wiki you are at right now.
--ulrik
+
+> If you put the publicfiles/ into the srcdir that ikiwiki builds the wiki
+> from, then it'll know about them and wikilinks to the files will work
+> same as wikilinks to any other files ikiwiki knows about. Perhaps
+> there's a reason you can't do that, such as the files being too large, or
+> not being available on the host you build on, I don't know. --[[Joey]]
+
+Yes, that would solve it. A part of me wanted though that it should be possible to put a symlink called publicfiles that basically points to wikiroot/../publicfiles, and have the ability to link to files with wikisyntax anyway. But it doesn't work since symlinks are dangerous, and.. how would ikiwiki know how to interpret a relative link, relative to source dir or dest dir (etc..)? I'll have to put all my images and publicfiles into the wiki; it is principally wrong since publicfiles are tar.gz (and a few .deb files) for software, but it is practically ok since the individual files are not more than 150K and I don't have anything against archiving them. --ulrik
+
+> You know, you don't need to check the files into revision control, they
+> can just be put in the srcdir of the wiki outside revision control.
+
+To try to formalize and clarify my first proposal: An administrator would
+be able for each wiki to create a list of off-wiki "places" that are
+accessed via certain items in the wiki root (or could be under a subpage
+too of course). The example is illustrated by publicfiles and the symlink,
+but a non-symlink solution would probably be better. A natural way to
+specify off-wiki places are absolute URLs, but also relative to the wiki
+root, since that would fit to my case. Just like you can't go out of the
+wiki root, you should not be able to go up from such an external resource.
+This should all be done in some plugin of course. I'll have to learn Perl
+before I write the plugin though :) --ulrik