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 :)