I am using mercurial as RCS backend and ikiwiki 2.40.

It seems that, when adding a blog post, it is not immediately commited to the mercurial repo. I have a page with this directive:

[[!inline  pages="journal/blog2008/* and !*/Discussion" show="0" feeds="no" actions="yes" rootpage="journal/blog2008"]]

When I add a blog post, I see it on the wiki but it doesn't appear on History or RecentChanges. If I run hg status on the wiki source dir, I see the new file has been marked as A (ie, a new file that has not been commited).

If I then edit the blog post, then the file gets commited and I can see the edit on History and RecentChanges. The creation of the file remains unrecorded. --?buo

Ikiwiki calls rcs_add() if the page is new, followed by rcs_commit(). For mercurial, these run respectively hg add and hg commit. If the add or commit fails, it will print a warning to stderr, you might check apache's error.log to see if there's anything there. --Joey

The problem was using accented characters (é, í) on the change comments. I didn't have an UTF-8 locale enabled in my setup file. By coincidence this happened for the first time in a couple of consecutive blog posts, so I was mistaken about the root of the problem. I don't know if you will consider this behavior a bug, since it's strictly speaking a misconfiguration but it still causes ikiwiki's mercurial backend to fail. A quick note in the docs might be a good idea. For my part, please close this bug, and thanks for the help. --?buo

So, in a non-utf8 locale, mercurial fails to commit if the commit message contains utf8? --Joey

(Sorry for the delay, I was AFK for a while.) What I am seeing is this: in a non-utf8 locale, using mercurial "stand-alone" (no ikiwiki involved), mercurial fails to commit if the commit message has characters such as á. If the locale is utf8, mercurial works fine (this is with mercurial 1.0).

However, the part that seems a bit wrong to me, is this: even if my locale is utf8, I have to explicitly set a utf8 locale in the wiki's setup file, or the commit fails. It looks like ikiwiki is not using this machine's default locale, which is utf8. Also, I'm not getting any errors on apache's error log.

Wouldn't it make sense to use the machine's default locale if 'locale' is commented out in the setup file?

Ikiwiki wrappers only allow whitelisted environment variables through, and the locale environment variables are not included currently.

But that's not the whole story, because "machine's default locale" is not very well defined. For example, my laptop is a Debian system. It has a locale setting in /etc/environment (LANG="en_US.UTF-8"). But even if I start apache, making sure that LANG is set and exported in the environment, CGI scripts apache runs do not see LANG in their environment. (I notice that /etc/init.d/apache explocitly forces LANG=C. But CGI scripts don't see the C value either.) Apache simply does not propigate its runtime environment to CGI scripts, and this is probably to comply with the CGI specification (although it doesn't seem to completly rule out CGI's being passed other variables).

If mercurial needs a utf-8 locale, I guess the mercurial plugin needs to check if it's not in one, and do something sane (either fail earlier, or complain, or strip utf-8 out of comments). --Joey