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authorJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>2022-01-03 15:33:47 -0700
committerJonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>2022-01-07 09:33:13 -0700
commitdb67eb748e7a8e9310accf3eff606b40008ef145 (patch)
tree01c45f3e91c0f969740076a1ddb77fe6f3ef3235 /Documentation
parentdocs: 5.Posting.rst: describe Fixes: and Link: tags (diff)
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docs: discourage use of list tables
Our documentation encourages the use of list-table formats, but that advice runs counter to the objective of keeping the plain-text documentation as useful and readable as possible. Turn that advice around the other way so that people don't keep adding these tables. Acked-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de> Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst11
1 files changed, 5 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst b/Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst
index 673cbb769c08..bb36f18ae9ac 100644
--- a/Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst
+++ b/Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst
@@ -261,12 +261,11 @@ please feel free to remove it.
list tables
-----------
-We recommend the use of *list table* formats. The *list table* formats are
-double-stage lists. Compared to the ASCII-art they might not be as
-comfortable for
-readers of the text files. Their advantage is that they are easy to
-create or modify and that the diff of a modification is much more meaningful,
-because it is limited to the modified content.
+The list-table formats can be useful for tables that are not easily laid
+out in the usual Sphinx ASCII-art formats. These formats are nearly
+impossible for readers of the plain-text documents to understand, though,
+and should be avoided in the absence of a strong justification for their
+use.
The ``flat-table`` is a double-stage list similar to the ``list-table`` with
some additional features: