I've started reviewing this, and the main thing I don't like is the
post-commit wrapper wrapper that ikiwiki-makerepo is patched to set up.
That just seems unnecessarily complicated. Why can't ikiwiki itself detect
the "cvs add <directory>" call and avoid doing anything in that case?
--[[Joey]] 

> The wrapper wrapper does three things:
>
> 7. It ignores `cvs add <directory>`, since this is a weird CVS
> behavior that ikiwiki gets confused by and doesn't need to act on.
> 7. It prevents `cvs` locking against itself: `cvs commit` takes a
> write lock and runs the post-commit hook, which runs `cvs update`,
> which wants a read lock and sleeps forever -- unless the post-commit
> hook runs in the background so the commit can "finish".
> 7. It fails silently if the ikiwiki post-commit hook is missing.
> CVS doesn't have any magic post-commit filenames, so hooks have to
> be configured explicitly. I don't think a commit will actually fail
> if a configured post-commit hook is missing (though I can't test
> this at the moment).
>
> Thing 1 can probably be handled within ikiwiki, if that seems less
> gross to you.
>
> Thing 2 I'm less sure of. (I'd like to see the web UI return
> immediately on save anyway, to a temporary "rebuilding, please wait
> if you feel like knowing when it's done" page, but this problem
> with CVS happens with any kind of commit, and could conceivably
> happen with some other VCS.)
>
> Thing 3 I think I did in order to squelch the error messages that
> were bollixing up the CGI. It was easy to do this in the wrapper
> wrapper, but if that's going away, it can be done just as easily
> with output redirection in `CVSROOT/loginfo`.
>
> --[[schmonz]]