stephan added on 2011-09-15 22:01:36 UTC:
Why would you expect a page name starting with a non-letter to work? i'm not aware of ANY wiki which allows wiki works to start with non-alpha characters (and most require CamelCaseWords). Fossil doesn't have a 100% generic document management system - it has a wiki, and wiki conventions call for certain naming patterns. Granted, fossil's naming conventions are "more flexible" than most wikis, but i would never expect a page name starting with a dot to work.

dmitry added on 2011-09-16 10:00:41 UTC:
I agree with the strangeness of the name, but the problem is that we have inconsistent behaviour. Currently Fossil:

• Allows creating a new page with dot in the beginning here: http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/wikinew Note that there are rules for names listed on this page; and ".Pagename" is okay by these rules.
• But when linking to such pages via [.Pagename] syntax, links don't work correctly (should point to http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/wiki?name=.Pagename, but point to http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/.Pagename).

We should either disallow creating wiki pages with "." in the beginning and update the rules, or fix the link formatting.

stephan added on 2011-09-16 10:31:49 UTC:
i would vote for requiring the name to start with a letter, but that requires more code for the validation and error handling :/. i think allowing any character as the start character will lead to ambiguities downstream at some point. e.g. if the first letter is '#', how do we distinguish that from an anchor link?