lockedit adds the form fields for a ?pagespec to preferences. This pagespec should be supplied "raw"; i.e., without quotes around it. Inexperienced users (such as myself) may provide an invalid pagespec, such as one with quotes on it. This will be merrily accepted by the form, but will cause no locking to take place.

Perhaps some validation should be performed on the pagespec and the form-submission return include "warning: this pagespec is invalid" or "warning: this pagespec does not match any existing pages" or similar.

The pagespec is no longer in the preferences and instead in the setup file now. That makes warning about a problem with it harder.

Ikiwiki could try to detect this problem and warn at setup time to stderr, I guess.

Main problem is I see little way to actually detect the problem you described. A pagespec with quotes around it is valid. For example, the pagespec "foo or bar" matches a page named "foo or a page named bar".

There are small classes of invalid pagespecs. For example, (foo or bar is invalid due to having unbalanced parens, while foo or and bar has invalid syntax. It's possible to detect these, I guess ... --Joey

Having moved it to the .setup file makes things more obvious I think. Anyway I consider this done, please de-done this if you disagree. --Jon