Gotchas

sphinx-build

A normal execution of sphinx-build will not show all warnings, as it interprets only changed files.

To check for warnings, touch all source reST files or run make clean before.

Also do a make clean if you change the structure of the document (e.g. rename or move a file).

Not shown text

When using Directives, they are prepanded by the comment directives: ‘’.. ‘’

For this reason, any mispelled directives will not be shown at all (and not even are warning is shown during sphinx-build).

Similar things happen, is a space is forgotten or a space or line break too many is used.

Help: I’m not aware about a reasonalbe approach to avoid this in reST.

Undefined link targets

For example, config directives can be defined and later on referenced by:

:config:option:`...`

If the link target Reference to a Resource Directive is unknown, the displayed text will not alter.

There will not even be a warning during Sphinx build, making it really hard to find typos in this kind of references.

toctree vs include

include

If a source file add another file via include, it will be integrated into the original source file (and not handled as a separate file). For this reason it is important, that the included document must match the sectioning scheme of the including document.

To avoid sphinx-build warnings, included files should use a different extension as the normal files (included by toctree).

• File extention of the master file and files included by toctree: *.rst

• File extention of files included by include: *.rst.inc

Background: As sphinx-build scans all matching files during the build process, it is aware about documents included by toctree, but not about plain include statements. As result, it will see the content of the included file twice: one as included file as part of the source file, once by the scan process during the build. Sphinx will then complain about double defined heading and references.

toctree

• When using (nested) toctrees, make sure to define a section header above it. Otherwise the header line of the result document will show <no title> in the hierarchie of headings.

• All files included by toctree start at the same section level. If the sections of a document should start at a lower level, a nested toctree element is needed.

  • For this reason, an included document is not required to use the same sectioning scheme as the including document.

• Important: files names of files included via toctree are part of the URL of the document. That means, they are also part of the URL of the references/sections. And the URL will change when a section is moved to another place.

:option:

Don’t use the :options: role, as this tries to refers to a option definition, which we don’t have. Also, as we document different programs, using option would require to prefix it with the program name, see https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/domains.html#directive-program.

This only applies to :options: without domain. We do you :config:option: in Bareos Configuration.