Hi Don,

As noted in my previous message, I suspect this entire segment (6/6) of
the patch is rendered unnecessary if you revert the introduction of the
.TP tagged paragraph macro immediately prior to the .TS table start
macro in segement 3/6.

Also, it's generally better style-wise (in my opinion!) to use tbl(1) to
achieve columnated output in man pages, rather than trying to use tab
stops for this purpose.  I suspect Mr. Kerrisk agrees; while there's no
formal guidance regarding this in man-pages(7), I find 722 lines
matching '^\.TS' in man-pages git HEAD, and only 10 matching
'^\.ta'--and all of those are in timezone-related pages[1], so they
perhaps came in together as part of some sort of import.

This is true even if all tbl(1) ends up doing is setting up tab stops
for you!  It is valuable to preserve the semantic content that tbl
macros give us.  Recognition of the distinction between semantic
markup and presentational markup has been hard-won in the decades since
the classic Unix toolkit was designed.

Finally, in man-pages project parlance, the change below, to convert
from a tbl-preprocessed table to a hand-crafted one using low-level roff
tab requests and literal tab characters, would probably be characterized
as a "srcfix" if there is no visible change to the page as rendered, and
"ffix" if there is[2].

Regards,
Branden

[1] for the curious: tzfile(5), zdump(8), and zic(8)
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/patches.html ; see "For trivial
    patches..."

At 2019-08-23T12:09:51-0500, Don Brace wrote:
> Reviewed-by: Matt Perricone <matt.perricone@microsemi.com>
> Reviewed-by: Scott Benesh <scott.benesh@microsemi.com>
> Signed-off-by: Don Brace <don.brace@microsemi.com>
> ---
>  man4/smartpqi.4 |   10 +++++-----
>  1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/man4/smartpqi.4 b/man4/smartpqi.4
> index 6e2cd1328..43e1d1cb2 100644
> --- a/man4/smartpqi.4
> +++ b/man4/smartpqi.4
> @@ -84,15 +84,15 @@ Specifies the action the driver takes when a controller
>  lockup is detected.
>  The default action is
>  .BR none .
> -.TP
> -.TS
> -l l
> ----
> -l l.
> +.nf
> +.ta 10n +10n
> +
>  parameter	action
> +---------	----------------------------
>  \fBnone\fP	take controller offline only
>  \fBreboot\fP	reboot the system
>  \fBpanic\fP	panic the system
> +.fi
>  .TP
>  .BR expose_ld_first= { 0 | 1 }
>  This option enables support for exposing logical devices to OS before physical devices.
>