I'm having some difficulties with ikiwiki's notion of time.

For (regular) pages, the last edited date is the one where the file was indeed last modified according to the file system information. The created date (commented out in the HTML) is, at least for --getctime operation, the date, where the file was last registered as changed with the VCS.

Now, at least with git, the thing is that when you're checking out files, they'll get the checkout-time's current time stamp.

What I strive for is the following: created be the date when the file (under its current name) was first registered with the VCS (which is more logical in my opinion), and last edited be the date the file was last registered as changed with the VCS, which is the current --getctime created date.

This means that I can build the HTML files from different checkouts of the VCS and they won't differ in the time stamps they contain in the HTML.

What is the rationale for ikiwiki's current behavior with respect to these time stamps?

--tschwinge

Presumably it's the authors of the git and mercurial backends not understanding the documentation for rcs_getctime, which states:

This is used to get the page creation time for a file from the RCS, by looking it up in the history.

I've fixed both broken implementations to correctly look up the first, not the last, commit. Other VCS do not seem to have the problem. --Joey