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Listing Feed: Sibling Output Unreadable

listing
A listing feed entry could not read its sibling output file; that item’s description is left empty.

Q-12-16 — Listing Feed: Sibling Output Unreadable

A listing feed entry could not read its sibling output file; that item’s description is left empty.

What this means

Each entry in a listing’s feed (Atom or RSS) carries a <description> element — typically the first paragraph or the explicit description: of the source item. To build that field, Quarto opens the item’s rendered sibling (the HTML file produced from the source) and extracts a description from it.

This warning fires when that read fails: the sibling file is not where Quarto expected it, or the process does not have permission to read it. The feed is still produced, but the affected entry’s <description> is empty.

Why this happens

Common causes:

  • The item failed to render, so no sibling output exists.
  • The render output directory is inconsistent — a partial build, an interrupted previous render, or an output that was cleaned out between the listing-resolution pass and the feed pass.
  • A filesystem permissions issue on the output directory.

How to fix

Re-render from a clean state (q2 render --clean or remove the output directory by hand). If the problem persists, render the single offending source file directly and check for render-time errors that prevented the sibling output from being written.