In commit aaa72a3a8, Joey noted:

bestlink returns '' if no existing page matches a link. This propigated through inline and other plugins, causing uninitialized value warnings, and in some cases (when filecheck was enabled) making the whole directive fail.

Skipping the empty results fixes that, but this is papering over another problem: If the missing page is later added, there is not dependency information to know that the inline needs to be updated. Perhaps smcv will fix that later.

Potential ways this could be addressed:

• Add a presence dependency on everything the reference could match: so if the inline is on a/b/c and the missing page is m, add a $depends_simple $DEPEND_PRESENCE dependency on a/b/c/m, a/b/m, a/m, m and (if configured) $config{userdir}/m

• Make the page names in [[!inline pagenames=...]] count as wikilinks, changing the behaviour of link() and backlinks, but causing appropriate rebuilds via the special cases in IkiWiki::Render

• Extend the special cases in IkiWiki::Render to consider a superset of wikilinks, to which pagenames would add its named pages, without affecting link() and backlinks

(Note that [[!inline pages=...]] cannot count as wikilinks, because pagespecs can contain link(), so can't be evaluated until we know what wikilinks exist, at which point it's too late to add more wikilinks.)

I think the presence dependency is probably the cleanest approach? --smcv

I think it was possibly a mistake to use wikilink style lookup for pagenames. --Joey

I used the linking rules to make references to "nearby" pages convenient, but if you'd prefer "absolute" semantics, my ready/literal-pagenames branch does that. For my main use-case for pagenames (album) it's fine either way. --smcv

Ok, merged. I think it's more consistent this way. --Joey