Hmm. My Darcs plugin for IkiWiki seems to mostly work. It’s full of nasty hacks, but it works. I did think I’d sorted out the bug where pages could be edited fine, but new pages wouldn’t be added to the darcs repo, but when Dan commented earlier it apparently wasn’t. I suspect it could be due to him not being logged in, which is something I can work around for my own site but not in general.

Update - 1625: Seems to be that files are added okay, but directories aren’t, so if the new page is in a new directory it goes missing.

For some reason, SmartyPants (or, at least, the Text::Typography perl module that uses the SmartyPants algorithm) defaults to using -- for en-dashes (–) and --- for em-dashes (—). LaTeX has been doing it the other way around for years: shorter (en) dashes are two hyphens, longer (em) dashes are three.

I assume the reasoning is that people generally want em-dashes, not en-dashes, so they should be faster. But I’m going to moan anyway.

To fix it, change the line in the typography subroutine from:

my $attr = defined $_[0] ? shift : 3;

to: my $attr = defined $_[0] ? shift : 2;

Yesterday I decided to try my hand at Debian packaging, and created bmautils, a couple of meta-packages to pull in stuff that I always end up installing.

Following on from my success, I set up a Debian repository to keep them in; a bit of trial and error was involved in working out where APT was looking for things. It’s probably not of much interest to anyone else (yet), but if you like you can add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list to try it out:

deb http://bmalee.eu/debian/ unstable main
deb-src http://bmalee.eu/debian/ unstable main

I also wrote myself a shell script, update-debarchive, to automate the process of updating it. Currently it moves packages from the incoming queue and generates the Packages.gz and Sources.gz files, as well as being able to create the directory structure.

?Here is a patch to IkiWiki to optionally sort inlined pages. I use it for the ?boxen page, which isn’t a blog (so shouldn’t be in date order) but I still want to have as an inlined thing.

Update: a patch based on this one has been commited to IkiWiki HEAD, so it’ll be available in the next release.