Changelog

Unreleased

New and Improved

• 🔧 Sphinx-CodeLinks now lives in the Sphinx-Needs repository, as packages/sphinx-codelinks.

  The whole of useblocks/sphinx-codelinks’ history came with it, rewritten so that every historical commit already places its files under that directory: git log and git blame read the full history there with no --follow, and packages/sphinx-codelinks/design/import-commit-map.txt maps every hash the old repository had to its hash in the new one.

  Some of the move is mechanical and already true; the rest is a checklist being worked through, and this bullet says which is which.

  • The repository (done): https://github.com/useblocks/sphinx-needs. Pull requests and branches are opened there, under packages/sphinx-codelinks/.

  • The issue tracker (in progress): https://github.com/useblocks/sphinx-needs/issues. The open issues are being transferred, keeping their labels; the issue form has a Package dropdown with sphinx-codelinks among its options, and issues and pull requests concerning this package get a pkg: sphinx-codelinks label. Old issue URLs redirect.

  • The documentation (in progress): https://codelinks.useblocks.com stays the address. It is served by GitHub Pages from the old repository until the Read the Docs project and the DNS move are done, and by Read the Docs afterwards; nothing changes for a reader of that URL.

  • The old repository will be archived rather than deleted, so every permalink and every git+https://…/sphinx-codelinks.git@<sha> pin keeps resolving. Repositories pinning @main will stop receiving updates and should re-point at PyPI or at git+https://github.com/useblocks/sphinx-needs.git@…#subdirectory=packages/sphinx-codelinks.

  • Release tags are prefixed: sphinx-codelinks-v1.4.0 rather than 1.4.0. The bare namespace in that repository is Sphinx-Needs’ own, and three of this project’s seven released version numbers name existing Sphinx-Needs releases.

  • An open pull request can be moved across without losing its commits or their authorship: clone the old repository, fetch your branch, run the same git filter-repo --to-subdirectory-filter packages/sphinx-codelinks the import ran, and cherry-pick the range onto master in the monorepo. The import pull request’s description carries the exact recipe.

• ⬆️ typer is no longer capped below 0.26.8. The cap protected the documentation build, whose sphinxcontrib-typer imported a typer.rich_utils name that 0.26.8 removed; the docs extra now requires sphinxcontrib-typer 0.9.1 or newer, which tracks the new typer and declares its own floor on it.

• ⬆️ click is no longer a dependency. The line existed only to cap it below 8.2, working around click 8.2.0 printing an empty error when codelinks ran with no arguments – an incompatibility in the typer of the time. This package never imported click itself, and the typer it requires no longer depends on click at all, so the cap was pinning a package nothing used; dropping it removes click from the environment.

• ⬆️ docutils 0.21 or newer is now required. The line was a bare docutils that left the floor to Sphinx, which accepts 0.20; it is now docutils>=0.21, the floor the whole Sphinx-Needs workspace declares and type-checks against. There is no upper bound: Sphinx caps docutils per series itself.

• 🐛 sphinx_codelinks.__version__ reported "0.1.0".

  It had said so since the first commit, through seven releases, while the distribution metadata said otherwise – so import sphinx_codelinks; sphinx_codelinks.__version__ on an installed 1.4.0 returned the wrong string. It is exported in __all__, so this is a public-API fix rather than a cosmetic one. From now on the two move together: the workspace’s bump command writes both, and its check_workspace fence fails when they disagree.

• 🐛 locate_git_root found no git root in a linked git worktree, where .git is a file rather than a directory (#106).

  locate_git_root required .git to be a directory, and get_remote_url and get_current_rev then read <root>/.git/config and <root>/.git/HEAD directly. In a linked worktree .git is a file holding gitdir: <path>, the remotes live in the main repository’s git directory named by commondir, and only per-worktree state is local – so every remote-url and every source link was missing, and a documentation build with -nW failed outright. Both shapes are now handled, with a regression test that builds a real worktree.

• 🔧 libclang is now genuinely optional for the test suite.

  It has always been an optional extra at runtime, and three test modules guarded it with pytest.importorskip; a fourth imported sphinx_codelinks.analyse.preproc without a guard, and that package imports the libclang loader eagerly, so an environment without the wheel failed during collection rather than skipping. It now degrades honestly: the 56 test cases that need the engine stop running, and the other 303 run – the summary reads 303 passed, 26 skipped, because a module-level importorskip is one skip per module and never collects the tests inside it.

• 🔧 Lint and type checking now use the Sphinx-Needs workspace’s configuration.

  The [tool.ruff] tables are the workspace root’s, and the one per-file-ignore entry this package still needs went to the root with them, scoped to packages/sphinx-codelinks/tests/* (E402, SIM300 – 2 findings if it were dropped). It is scoped rather than **/tests/* because at the root that glob would silently loosen the other packages’ suites too. Linting and formatting are now uv run poe lint, which runs the whole workspace’s hook set. Type checking moves from mypy to ty – uv run poe typecheck – the mypy dependency group becomes a typing one that pins the oldest supported Sphinx and docutils, and the 61 # type: ignore comments become 17 # ty: ignore ones. The dead pydantic.mypy plugin – nothing in the package imports pydantic – and the unused pytest-docker, moto and psutil test dependencies go with it. No behaviour changed; the whole diff is import order, suppressions and configuration.

• ‼️ Sphinx-Needs 8.5 or newer is now required (previously 5.0 or newer).

  Sphinx-CodeLinks is being imported into the Sphinx-Needs repository as a package of its uv workspace, where there is exactly one Sphinx-Needs and the manifest is required to track it tightly — sphinx-needs>=8.5.0,<9 — so a wheel can never claim compatibility with a release it was not tested against. The per-Sphinx-Needs test factor is gone with it, and the two compatibility shims the old floor needed have been deleted: the add_field import fallback for Sphinx-Needs < 8, and the add_extra_option signature probe that chose between a schema-aware and a schema-less registration. Both already took the modern branch on Sphinx-Needs 8.5, so behaviour there is unchanged.

• ✨ Python 3.11 is now supported; the floor moves down from 3.12.

  The full test suite passes on 3.11 unchanged, and the floor now equals the one the Sphinx-Needs workspace declares. The test matrix runs py{311,312,313,314} against sphinx{7,8,9}, with one corner left out: py311-sphinx9 is deliberately not a valid environment. Not because Sphinx 9 needs Python 3.12 – Sphinx 9.0.x declares requires-python >=3.11 and is exactly what a Python 3.11 user resolves by default, since 9.1 excludes itself for them – but to align with the Sphinx-Needs workspace this package is being imported into, whose sphinx-9 dependency group is sphinx~=9.1; python_version >= '3.12' and is therefore empty on 3.11. No package in that workspace is tested on 3.11 against Sphinx 9, and this matrix is replaced by that one at import, so the combination is left unexercised here too, deliberately.

• 📚 The documentation sources moved up beside conf.py, so Read the Docs can build them.

  docs/source/* is now docs/*, and the docs build no longer passes -c: sphinx-build -nW --keep-going -b html docs docs/_build/html is what uv run poe docs-codelinks runs and what Read the Docs runs by itself. A .readthedocs.yaml comes with it, and the docs requirements move from a dependency group to a docs extra, which is the only form Read the Docs can install. The rendered site is unchanged; only the “edit this page” links point at the new paths.

• ✨ The default configuration file is now ubproject.toml.

  src_trace_config_from_toml now defaults to "ubproject.toml" and the documentation recommends this file name throughout. ubproject.toml is the shared ubCode project file, which other useblocks tools — e.g. Sphinx-Needs via needs_from_toml or the ubCode checker in VS Code — read as well. Keeping the [codelinks] configuration in this single file makes all tools aware of the configured codelinks projects, which previously required a separate file per tool (e.g. src_trace.toml) and left tools like the ubCode checker reporting Unknown codelinks project (ubcode-pub#75).

  A default file that does not exist or contains no [codelinks] table is silently ignored, so existing projects without ubproject.toml keep building without new warnings. The default is the value ubproject.toml exactly – left unset, or written in conf.py as that string – so a 1.4.0 project that wrote src_trace_config_from_toml = "ubproject.toml" no longer gets a warning for a missing file or a missing table. Any other value, ./ubproject.toml included, is an explicit file and warns when missing or without the table. A file that exists but cannot be read or parsed – invalid TOML, not UTF-8, a directory, a codelinks key that is not a table – warns (codelinks.config) either way, as any configured file did at 1.4.0. The documentation project itself now stores its codelinks configuration in ubproject.toml.

• 🐛 A value given on the command line with -D now overrides the TOML file.

  sphinx-build -D src_trace_set_local_url=0 was silently overwritten by a set_local_url in the [codelinks] table. The order is now -D > TOML > conf.py > default, as in Sphinx-Needs. Only the full src_trace_<key> name counts: a bare -D set_local_url=0, which Sphinx rejects as an unknown setting, leaves the TOML value alone. src_trace_projects always comes from conf.py or the TOML: Sphinx refuses to override a dictionary setting with -D, and the dotted -D src_trace_projects.<name>=... form is not supported. Sphinx refuses -D src_trace_outdir too, whose default is a path, and the TOML value then stands. A -D value Sphinx cannot convert (-D src_trace_set_local_url=yes on Sphinx 8.2 or newer) is now reported by Sphinx instead of being silently replaced by the TOML, as it already was without a TOML.

• 👌 ubproject.toml is read through ub-project, the shared reader of the Sphinx-Needs family, which is now a dependency (ub-project>=1.1.0,<2).

  Both the Sphinx extension and codelinks analyse parse the file and select the [codelinks] table through it, and relative paths are anchored through its anchor, at the same directories as before. What changes is what a broken file says: every message names the file and the problem (invalid TOML, not valid UTF-8, [codelinks] must be a table, got str), an explicitly configured file without a [codelinks] table says so instead of printing 'codelinks', and codelinks analyse shows why a file could not be loaded rather than only that it could not – a codelinks key that is 0, false or [] is now reported as not a table instead of as a missing section. The extension’s warnings about its configuration file carry the type codelinks.config, so suppress_warnings = ["codelinks.config"] silences them.

1.4.0

Released:

30.07.2026

New and Improved

• ✨ Added Bash language support for the analyse module.

  Comments in shell scripts are now parsed for need ID references and one-line need definitions. .sh, .bash, .zsh, and .ksh files are discovered when comment_type = "bash". The supported comment style is #. Fish shell is not supported (no tree-sitter-fish grammar is published for the Python package).

• ✨ Added an opt-in preprocessor-aware C/C++ extraction engine, powered by libclang.

  The default tree-sitter engine sees every comment in a file, regardless of conditional compilation. Configuring the new analyse.preprocessor table switches C/C++ extraction to libclang, which evaluates the preprocessor and emits only the markers in active branches — a need behind an inactive #if / #else is dropped. Compiler flags are resolved per file from a compile_commands.json compilation database, with an explicit defines list for headers, which are not listed in such a database. Active markers keep their original line numbers.

  The engine requires the optional libclang dependency (pip install 'sphinx-codelinks[libclang]'). Plain tree-sitter C/C++ extraction is unaffected when it is not installed. See Preprocessor-Aware C/C++ Extraction (libclang) for details.

• 📚 Traced the preprocessor-aware C/C++ engine in the feature documentation.

  features.rst now declares the engine as a feature with its fault children, and the implementation carries the one-line markers that link back to it. The engine is therefore covered by the project’s own traceability report, like every supported language.

• 🧪 Added a declarative fixture and snapshot test layer for marker extraction.

  Extraction cases are now data (a YAML fixture plus a captured JSON snapshot) instead of bespoke test functions, covering the one-line, need-ID-reference and @rst block surfaces across all supported languages.

Fixes

• 🐛 Anchor newline-terminated one-line markers to the start of the comment.

  A start sequence (default @) that appeared in free-form prose was matched anywhere in a comment, so a line such as // See @author, check the example was parsed as a need definition and the bogus ID raised InvalidNeedException in Sphinx-Needs. Markers that run to the end of the line now only match when nothing but comment decoration (//, #, *, ///, //!, …) and whitespace precedes the start sequence. Markers with an explicit end_sequence (e.g. [[ … ]]) are self-delimiting and remain position-independent, so they may still follow prose.

• 🐛 Pinned typer and sphinxcontrib-typer to keep the documentation build working.

  typer 0.26.8 removed rich_utils.STYLE_METAVAR and sphinxcontrib-typer 0.9.1 requires rich_utils.STYLE_TYPES; either combination broke sphinx-build. The dependencies are now capped at typer<0.26.8 and sphinxcontrib-typer<0.9.1.

1.3.0

Released:

20.06.2026

New and Improved

• ✨ Added Go parser for the analyse module.

  Need ID references and one-line need definitions can now be extracted from Go source files. The supported comment styles are // and /* */.

• ✨ Added JSONC language support for the analyse module.

  Comments in JSONC files are now parsed for need ID references and one-line need definitions. .json files are also checked when they begin with a comment (see jsonc.org).

• 👌 Replaced gitignore-parser with ignore-python for source discovery.

  This adds native nested .gitignore support, improves performance, and brings behavioral parity with ubCode. A per-project follow_links configuration option was also added.

• ⬆️ Support and test Sphinx-Needs v5-8.

• ⬆️ Allow Sphinx 9.

• 📚 Documented C# language support in features.rst.

• 🧪 Added a Sphinx integration test for C# source files.

Fixes

• 🐛 Register Sphinx-Needs fields with a typed schema.

  The project, file, directory and URL fields are now registered with a typed (string) schema, so they no longer trigger schema violations on needs that do not set them when strict Sphinx-Needs schema validation is enabled.

• 🐛 Do not mutate the rebuild='env' src_trace_projects configuration during builds.

  Incremental Sphinx builds no longer re-read every document on each run.

• 🐛 Route analyse logging through the active environment instead of installing a stderr handler at import time.

  Routine INFO progress no longer goes to stderr unconditionally, and importing the package no longer forces a logging handler onto consumers.

• 🐛 Validate field default ordering in the oneline configuration.

  A required field defined after a field with a default is now reported as an error instead of being silently skipped.

1.2.0

Released:

18.02.2026

New and Improved

• ✨ Added Rust parser for the analyse module.

  Need ID references and one-line need definitions can now be extracted from Rust source files.

• 👌 Added explicit git_root configuration option.

  Users can now explicitly specify the Git root directory instead of relying on automatic detection.

• 👌 Enhanced warning logging in the oneline parser.

  Warning messages now include more context to help diagnose parsing issues.

• 📚 Added traceability page to the documentation.

• 📚 Added features.rst page documenting the full feature set with source tracing.

Fixes

• 🐛 Fixed space handling in marker extraction.

  Leading and trailing spaces in extracted marker content are now correctly stripped.

1.1.0

Released:

02.10.2025

New and Improved

• ✨ Added C# parser for analyse module.

  Need ID references and marked RST blocks can be extracted from C# source files. The comments styles supported are:(//, /* */, ///)

• ✨ Added YAML parser for analyse module.

  Need ID references can be extracted from YAML files. The supported comment style is # as well as inline comment style, e.g. key: value # comment.

• 👌 Directive src-trace itself does not create need items anymore and only generate need items from the one-line need definition in the given source.

  The need item is removed because:

  • It has no use cases so far.

  • It creates extra need items users may not actually want in their documentation

  • It creates errors with some Sphinx-Needs configurations, e.g., when need_id_required or needs_statuses is defined.

Fixes

• 🐛 Replace absolute path with relative path to fix local-url not working on the non-local environment

• 🐛 Add more file extensions of C/C++ for SourceDiscover

1.0.0

Released:

22.08.2025

New and Improved

• ✨ Added a new analyse CLI command and corresponding API.

  The analyse command parses source files (Python, C/C++) and extracts markers from comments. It can extract three types of markers, as documented in the analyse section:

  • One-line need definitions

  • Need ID references

  • Marked RST blocks

  The extracted markers and their metadata are saved to a JSON file for further processing.

• ✨ Added a new write rst CLI command.

  The write rst command writes a reStructuredText file with needextend directive from the extracted markers generated by analyse. The generated RST can be included in the Sphinx documentation to create the source code links in the existing needs

• 👌 Replaced virtual_docs with the new analyse module.

  The virtual_docs feature, which handled one-line need definitions (OneLineCommentStyle), has been migrated into the new analyse module and removed from the core. The caching feature of virtual_docs is temporarily removed and may be reintroduced later.

• 👌 Updated the src-trace Sphinx directive.

  The src-trace directive now uses the new analyse API instead of the old virtual_docs one.

• 👌 Unified configuration in TOML

  The configuration for src-trace directive defined in TOML is now compatible with the new analyse module.

0.1.2

Released:

16.07.2025

Fixes

• 🐛 Apply default configuration values when not given

  When a user does not specify certain configuration options, the extension will automatically use predefined default values, allowing users to get started quickly without needing to customize every option. Users can override these defaults by explicitly providing their own configuration values.

• 🐛 Fix local links for multi project configurations

  Local links between docs and one-line need definitions work correctly, when src_dir in multiple project configurations point at different locations.

0.1.1

Released:

11.07.2025

Initial release of Sphinx-CodeLinks

This version features:

• ✨ Sphinx Directive src-trace

• ✨ Virtual Docs and Source Discovery CLI

• ✨ One-line comment to define a Sphinx-Needs need item