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docs: discourage use of list tables
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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>
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Jonathan Corbet committed Jan 7, 2022
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11 changes: 5 additions & 6 deletions Documentation/doc-guide/sphinx.rst
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Expand Up @@ -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:
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