Cannot create listing from sibling directory

[cbcGirard]

I have:

• searched the issue tracker for similar issues
• installed the latest version of Quarto CLI
• formatted my issue following the Bug Reports guide

Bug description

When creating a listing in a subdirectory, standard notation for including a sibling directory does not appear to work.

Steps to reproduce

Minimal example in this repository.

/faculty/landing.qmd is supposed to include a listing of files in both /faculty and /shared directories

Actual behavior

Only the files in /faculty are shown in the rendered listing; despite several attempts to indicate the /shared directory as another source of files, system

Expected behavior

Files in /shared should also be included in the listing in /faculty/landing.qmd, e.g. by including

listing: 
    contents: 
        - .
        - ../shared

in the landing page's metadata.

Your environment

• IDE: VSCode 1.122.1
• OS: MacOS 26.5.1

Quarto check output

Quarto 1.9.38
[✓] Checking environment information...
      Quarto cache location: /Users/cgirard/Library/Caches/quarto
[✓] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.8.3: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.87.0: OK
      Deno version 2.4.5: OK
      Typst version 0.14.2: OK
[✓] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[✓] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.9.38
      Path: /Applications/quarto/bin

[✓] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: (not installed)
      Chromium: (not installed)
      Chrome Headless Shell: (not installed)
      VeraPDF: (not installed)

[✓] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: Installation From Path
      Path: /Library/TeX/texbin
      Version: 2023

[✓] Checking Chrome Headless....................OK
      Using: Chrome found on system
      Path: /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google Chrome
      Source: MacOS known location

[✓] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[✓] Checking R installation...........(None)

      Unable to locate an installed version of R.
      Install R from https://cloud.r-project.org/

[✓] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.12.3 (Conda)
      Path: /Users/cgirard/mambaforge/bin/python
      Jupyter: 5.7.2
      Kernels: python3

[✓] Checking Jupyter engine render....OK

[✓] Checking Julia installation...

[mcanouil]

The statement is not true and the issue is not about siblings from what I can see.
It surely can:

listing: 
  contents: 
    - ../shared/*.qmd
    - ./*.qmd

I'm also quite unsure what you were expected from all the globs you placed which overlaps or do not even exist.

• https://github.com/cbcGirard/minimal_sibling_example/blob/2961814e1bb0048980afa2aaac977a9f97a7ad49/faculty/landing.qmd#L3-L11

The issue seems to be that some combinations of paths/globs lead to some resolution conflict.

For example:

listing: 
  contents: 
    - ../shared/*.qmd
    - ../shared

leads to:

WARN: The listing in 'faculty/landing.qmd' using the following contents:
- ../shared/*.qmd
- ../shared
doesn't match any files or folder

with no pages inside the listing.

The listing content is properly found once you drop ../shared.

Regarding siblings, having the following works just fine in your case unless there is a directory which gets picked up by . alone.

listing: 
  contents: 
    - ../shared/*.qmd
    - .

So there is an issue with paths/globs resolution when mixing.
I suggest you stick to glob as a workaround for now.

[mcanouil]

A ../ glob is matched with a regex that never resolves the .., so it can never match a
project input path.

readContents has two code paths.
A bare directory ("posts") or the default glob forces the filterPaths path instead of the filesystem path:

• quarto-cli/src/project/types/website/listing/website-listing-read.ts

  Lines 755 to 780 in c284199

  	if (hasInputs || hasDefaultGlob) {
  	// If this is a glob, expand it
  	const filtered = filterPaths(
  	dirname(source),
  	inputsWithoutSource,
  	finalGlobs,
  	);
  	// If a glob points to a file that exists, go ahead and just include
  	// that, even if it isn't a project input
  	for (const glob of finalGlobs) {
  	if (safeExistsSync(glob) && Deno.statSync(glob).isFile) {
  	filtered.include.push(
  	isAbsolute(glob) ? glob : join(Deno.cwd(), glob),
  	);
  	}
  	}
  	return filtered;
  	} else {
  	return resolvePathGlobs(
  	dirname(source),
  	finalGlobs,
  	["_*", ".*", "**/_*", "**/.*", source],
  	);
  	}

filterPaths matches globs against absolute input paths with globToRegExp, which keeps .. literal.
Combined with the **/ that asFullGlob prepends, the reprex glob becomes <faculty>/**/../shared/*.qmd, a regex that can never match the normalised input <proj>/shared/sharedDoc.qmd:

• quarto-cli/src/core/path.ts

  Line 149 in c284199

  const regex = globToRegExp(`${root}${needSlash ? "/" : ""}${glob}`);

• quarto-cli/src/core/path.ts

  Lines 281 to 283 in c284199

  	if (!glob.startsWith("/")) {
  	if (smartGlob && (!options || !options.explicitSubfolderSearch)) {
  	return "**/" + glob;

The other path (resolvePathGlobs -> expandGlobSync) resolves .. on disk, so ../shared/*.qmd works alone; it only breaks when a directory/default glob co-occurs.

[cbcGirard]

Maybe I should have rephrased the title: [I] cannot [figure out how to] create listing from sibling directory ;) Your first metadata example does exactly what I was looking for.

I was operating under the assumption that each entry in contents would be handled independently, hence multiple overlapping entries in the example (throwing everything at the wall to see if anything stuck). Looks like that assumption was wrong if the way I indicate the current directory's files affects the search for other directories' files.

Thanks for the quick response and workaround!