[Docutils-develop] [docutils:feature-requests] Re: #91 reST: include directive should support root-relative paths

[Michal U. <xev...@us...>]

All of workarounds you have listed seem dirty for me (placing various constraints on the repository, file system or something else) so I think I will have to write my own plugin for it.

> Open questions remain, e.g. whether to use an configurable "include path
root" only for included reStructuredText files or also for code, literal
include, and parsed includes.
In the first case, it might be better to support a configurable list of
standard include directories.

Not really sure, this is beyond my knowledge of Docutils. I can only share my experience with C and C++ build systems which do a lot of similar stuff, though the situation there is simpler from this point of view because everything there is code. Overall, I think that *there is a consensus from the frameworks adding "project" support that this is helpful* because majority of frameworks I have seen (if not all) do have a mechanism where some paths are root-relative and the framework expects certain files in certain places.




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** [feature-requests:#91] reST: include directive should support root-relative paths**

**Status:** open
**Group:** None
**Created:** Tue May 03, 2022 04:03 PM UTC by Michal Urbanski
**Last Updated:** Wed May 04, 2022 09:19 AM UTC
**Owner:** nobody


I'm building a static website using restructuredtext and I'm really annoyed by the lack of support for root-relative paths.

I have already implemented multiple directive plugins for my website build process, some of which use external files in a different format. They use the convention that if a path begins with /, they are relative to the root directory of the project.

IMO the requirement for relative paths is very limiting - I could have a directory with files intended for inclusion but:

- I would need to use `../../` which is very ugly
- relative paths are different depending on the current file path - this is very fragile and limits 

An additional argument is that C and C++ have been using #include for like 40 years and relative paths (while sometimes useful) are only for specific cases. The leading convention is to use root-relative paths.

I could implement another plugin for it but ... copy-pasting docutils own code only to change few lines is definitely smelly.


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