Re: [PATCH v1] doc: autogenerate nic overview table from ini files

[Thomas Monjalon <thomas.monjalon@6wind.com>]

2016-06-30 19:03, John McNamara:
> This patch converts the NIC feature table in the overview doc into a set of
> ini files and adds some functions into the Sphinx conf.py file to convert them
> back into an RST table.
> 
> The reason for doing this is to make it easier for PMD maintainers to update
> the feature matrix that makes up the table and to avoid frequent and hard to
> resolve conflicts in doc/guides/nics/overview.rst.

Great idea!

Would it be possible to make it a bit more generic and reusable to
generate other tables of this kind?

> * In order to avoid the merge conflict issue noted above the RST table is now
>   in an external RST include file and excluded from the repo via .gitignore.

It would be better to generate the rst file in the build directory.
But I guess it makes sphinx build more difficult.

> * Blank entries in the PMD ini files are optional. They will get a default
>   blank entry in the RST table based on the entries in the default.ini file.
>   The ini files in this patch were generated programmatically from the
>   original RST table.

I don't think there is a benefit to have blank entries in the .ini file.
And there would be less conflicts if the guideline was to avoid blank entries
when adding a new feature.
> 
> * I would like to extend this to produce a pure Html table with rotated column
>   headers like this: https://css-tricks.com/rotated-table-column-headers/
>   I tried to get this to work within the current RST + CSS preamble but
>   failed.

Nice

> * I would also like to extend this to produce a table, or more likely a number
>   of tables, that would display the same information in the PDF document
>   without going off the page.

PDF output is restrictive :)