(brief, sorry, via Phone. More details to follow)

I  gradually splitting discussion pages into separate comment pages, containing a comment directive.

The "date" attribute is being set to the date output by gig for a commit. (I'd hope this was parseable)

The presentation of the resulting comments is not sorted by this date, which I would hope/expect, but instead by the ctime or mtime of the file at the other end, as best I can tell.

-- [[Jon]]

> Yes, comments are displayed via an inline, and usual [[pagespec/sorting]]
> (eg, default of when the file was first seen) is used. The comment
> date only affects the date displayed.
>
> > That's not what I intended - it's meant to be more or less just
> > syntactic sugar for `\[[!meta date=foo]]`, setting the `%pagectime`.
> > The code looks as though it ought to work, but perhaps it's buggy?
> > (edited to add: it is, see below) --[[smcv]]
> 
> The only time I've seen this be much problem personally is when moving
> a page, which means moving its comments directory, which tends to
> jumble the order. (And --gettime does not help, as ikiwiki does not
> tell git to follow renames for speed reasons.)
> 
> I wonder if it wouldn't be best to just get rid of the extra date
> inside the comment, and rely on the file date as is done for other pages.
> Thoughts [[smcv]]?
>
> Altenatively, since comments tend to be named "comment_N_.....", 
> adding a new [[pagespec/sorting]] method that sorts by filename, 
> rather than by title, and using it by default for comments might be 
> better than the current situation. --[[Joey]] 

>> Since git does not track file time, I tend to prefer to encode date
>> stuff inside files where possible.  For other pages, I put an explicit
>> [[plugins/meta]] date into the source when I create the page.  I've
>> had to reconstruct ordering after moving to a different git checkout
>> after a server move before, it was painful ☺
>>
>> In my current situation, I could live with by-filename ordering. By-title
>> ordering would also be workable. — [[Jon]]

>>> I agree with Jon's reasons for embedding an explicit date in the file.
>>> As I said, this is *meant* to work, but it might not.
>>>
>>> Sorting by filename would only be useful with
>>> [[!cpan Sort::Naturally]], since normal `cmp` ordering would break pages
>>> with more than 9 comments. --s

----

[[!template id=gitbranch author="[[smcv]]" branch=smcv/comments-metadata]]

I thought that, as internal pages, comments were not preprocessed
(and so their date attributes did not have a chance to take effect) until
they were already being inlined, by which time they have already been
sorted by the files' ctimes. Actually, I was wrong about that - internal
pages have a special case elsewhere - but they did skip the `scan` hook,
which is also fixed in my branch.

The real bug was that the preprocess hook for comments didn't run
in the scan phase; my branch fixes that, streamlines that hook a bit
when run in the scan phase (so it doesn't htmlize, and only runs nested
directives in scan mode), and adds a regression test. --[[smcv]]

[[!tag patch]]

> Thanks.. I am not 100% sure if I just forgot to scan internal pages
> or left it out as some kind of optimisation since none needed to be
> scanned. Anyway, if it was an optimisation it was not much of one
> since they were preprocessed. All applied, [[done]]. --[[Joey]] 
