I expect the different numbering style (Roman numerals) was used here to differentiate this inner numbered list from the outer one.

Before

After

Can we keep it them as Roman numerals, but fix the formatting?

Sphinx <7 doesn't seem to support them, so they are actually just regular paragraphs starting withI. .... Letters likea. b. c. ... are also not supported, so we only have numbers left and have to rely on the indentation to distinguish the levels.

I see.

Well, we need to keep support for older Sphinx for the benefit of Linux distros (and are testing it on CI), but can we use Sphinx 7 for our actual main build and deploy?

The Roman numerals won't cause any errors for for Sphinx <7, and they'll be better rendered for for Sphinx 7.

Re:#99380 and cc@AA-Turner.

I should be able to fix the indentation/rendering of the nested lists while keeping the roman numerals, the only issue is that since they are rendered as<p>s rather than<li>s, it's technically incorrect (at least on Sphinx <7). Not sure if that matters though (maybe for screen readers or similar cases?).

Actually if I fix it for <7, once we upgrade to 7 it will break again.

On <7 I could do:

I. The keyword is looked up as an attribute on the subject.* ...* ...

which will be seen as a paragraph followed by a list, but on 7 it would have to be:

I. The keyword is looked up as an attribute on the subject.   * ...   * ...

since it will be seen as a list item followed by a sublist that needs to be indented.

If I leave the indentation on <7, it will render an additional blockquote around the sublist, and it will causesphinx-lint to complain, so switching to numbers might still be the best compromise.

I don't mind too much if the display isn't perfect for <7, as long as it still builds and looks reasonable.

Then we can use 7 for our deploys, and sphinx-lint will be happy too.

Would that work?

sphinx-lint will be sad on 7 too, since the checker currently ignores alphabetic lists (like Sphinx 6 does) and sees this as an incorrectly indented list under a paragraph, regardless of the Sphinx version used.

I tried adding support for alphabetic lists, but it's a can of worms with many false positives.

Hmm, maybe we should ignore the Sphinx Lint warning here?

I haven't looked into this in a while, but if possible we should find a solution that is both rendered correctly and that is not reported bysphinx-lint as error.
Fixingsphinx-lint is also an option if the error is reported mistakenly, but avoiding alphabetic lists and roman numerals might still be a simpler solution.