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>
This commit is contained in:
Jonathan Corbet 2022-01-03 15:33:47 -07:00
parent bf33a9d42d
commit db67eb748e
1 changed files with 5 additions and 6 deletions

View File

@ -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: