ikiwiki/doc/roadmap/discussion.mdwn

Changing pagespecs to be relative by default is quite feasible now, but it will cause
backwards compatibility problems. Should this be marked as a future plan, perhaps at a 
major version number like 2.0? --Ethan

Yes, I'm looking at making this kind of change at 2.0, added to the list.
(Update: Didn't make it in 2.0 or 3.0...)
However, I have doubts that it makes good sense to go relative by default.
While it's not consitent with links, it seems to work better overall to
have pagespecs be absolute by default, IMHO. --[[Joey]]

I think after you work with ikiwiki for a while, it "makes more sense" for 
them to be absolute, but I definitely remember tripping over absolute
pagespecs a few times when I was just starting out. Thus I think we've
learned to accept it as natural, where a new user wouldn't.

* bugs, todo, news, blog, users, and sandbox
  are all at "toplevel", so they are equivalent whether 
  pagespecs are absolute or relative.
* soc doesn't refer to any pages explicitly so it doesn't matter
* various plugins have pagespecs at plugins/foo.mdwn: map, linkmap, orphans,
  pagecount, pagestats
  * I'd say most of these make more sense as having abs. pagespecs
  * I note that your sitemap is at toplevel, but there's no reason
    not to allow putting it in a special meta/ directory.
* examples/blog and examples/software site need to have relative pagespecs,
  but they're pretty special cases -- for a real site those things
  will probably be toplevel
* plugins/contrib makes more sense to inline relative (though it doesn't
  right now)

Maybe inline should use relative pagespecs by default, and other plugins 
don't? --Ethan