Re: [PATCH 2/9] docs: escape ** glob pattern in MAINTAINERS descriptions

[Joe Perches]

On Mon, 2026-05-04 at 14:20 -0700, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> On 5/4/26 8:51 AM, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> From: Matteo Croce <[teknoraver@xxxxxxxx](mailto:teknoraver@xxxxxxxx)>
> > 
> > Escape '**' in the MAINTAINERS descriptions section to prevent
> > reStructuredText from interpreting it as bold/strong inline markup,
> > which causes a warning when running 'make htmldocs'.
[]
> It's nice to eliminate one warning from 'make htmldocs', so this is good
> in that regard. However, there are still multiple problems (not Warnings)
> with '*' characters in the MAINTAINERS file:
> 
> 1) 	   F:	*/net/*		all files in "any top level directory"/net
> 
> In the html output, it shows "/net/" italicized (that's what one * does).
> 
> 2)	   F:	fs/**/*foo*.c	all *foo*.c files in any subdirectory of fs
> 
> In the html output, it shows
> 
> 	F: fs/**/foo.c all foo.c files in any subdirectory of fs
> 
> with both occurrences of "foo.c" italicized (dropping the '*' characters).
> 
> These 2 examples are actively wrong.
> 
> [adding new:]
> We would be better served by just putting file patterns inside ``fs/**/*foo*.c``
> quotation marks IMO.
> 
> Ah, similar to what you do in the table output.
> 
> Oh, with one little glitch:
> E.g., in the very first entry for 3C59X NETWORK DRIVER,
>   F:	Documentation/networking/device_drivers/ethernet/3com/vortex.rst
>   F:	drivers/net/ethernet/3com/3c59x.c
> it looks like automarkup is applied to the Documentation file so these
> 2 files are displayed as:
> 
> networking/device_drivers/ethernet/3com/vortex, drivers/net/ethernet/3com/3c59x.c
> 
> with the Doc file underlined and missing both Documentation and .rst.
> Or maybe that's what you intended since the automarkup link does work.
> It's just not what I expected. Oh well.

Please stop trying to format MAINTAINERS into rst.
It shouldn't be formatted.
It's simple text.