Can the 'Unexpected indentation' error be suppressed with sphinx?

So I'm attempting to fix the warnings in an existing project, containing license.rst:

License
=======

.. include:: ../LICENSE.txt

where LICENSE.txt has this structure:

Copyright ...

... provided that the following conditions are met:
   *  Foo
      bar.
   *  Baz
      bee.
   *  Bop
      bow.
 
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" ...

This causes the error ../LICENSE.txt:7: ERROR: Unexpected indentation. (which refers to the * FOO line). This is because the include directive in license.rst is going to parse LICENSE.txt as if it were a .rst file (from what I understand).

I can add :literal: or :code: in license.rst to fix the error:

License
=======

.. include:: ../LICENSE.txt
    :literal:

but this drastically changes the look of the generated website, which I'd have to ask approval of from our client, which is a bit of a headache.

I have already used suppress_warnings = ["etoc.toctree"] to suppress a warning, but the Unexpected indentation doesn't state which warning type it belongs to.

I tried using suppress_warnings = ["etoc.toctree", "Unexpected indentation", "Unexpected indentation.", "ERROR: Unexpected indentation", "ERROR: Unexpected indentation."], but the mentions of suppress_warnings in the codebase don't seem to indicate such usage of suppress_warnings being possible.

I found this Sphinx GitHub issue comment asking for the same feature, but the comment was left in 2020, so I'm curious whether changes were made that have now made it possible.

So, is there a way to just suppress this warning, or maybe just all warnings from this specific file? Thanks.

Solution

This error message is from the Docutils rST parser. The included file is no valid reStructuredText.

Workarounds:

The save way is to adress the core of the issue
- edit the license file to become valid reStructuredText (i.e. add empty lines around lists) or
- include it as "literal" text (maybe with a CSS-class and custom CSS rules to use the standard text font instead of monospace).
Alternatively, you may try including the license file as Markdown:
```
.. include:: LICENSE.txt
   :parser: markdown
```
(This requires a 3rd party Markdown parser).
Docutils allows to configure the report level via the "report-level" configuration setting in a "docutils.conf" configuration file. If nothing else works and you are sure, that the output of the license text is correct and there are no other errors or WARNING-level problems in any file of the project, you may try with
```
[general]
report_level: 2
```
in a file docutils.conf in the project root directory.

Unfortunately, there is no fine-grained report-level system, so this will permantently disable all Docutils messages above level 2 (SEVERE).