Invalid section numbering

[nowox]

Subject: The document title should not always be numbered

Problem

With a file such as

==========
Document Title
==========

.. sectnum:: 

Section
=====

Subsection
------------

I am expecting to see

Document Title

1. Section

1.1 Subsection

Unfortunately, the document title is also numbered which does not make any sense here.

1. Document Title

1.1 Section

1.1.1 Subsection

To show that I am not the only one to think that way, if you look at how GitHub render ReST files here:

https://github.com/nowox/sphinx-fix-sectnum/blob/master/index.rst

You will see that the numbering is the same as what I want

Procedure to reproduce the problem

git clone https://github.com/nowox/sphinx-fix-sectnum
cd sphinx-fix-sectnum
sed -i "s/'fix-secnum'//" conf.py
make html

To see the corrected version:

git reset --hard master
make html

[tk0miya]

In sphinx, --no-doc-title option of docutils is set (note: internal name is doctitle_xform). The reason of that is a conflict with toctree.

FYI: Without --no-doc-title, docutils promotes a top-level section title to document title. As a result, sectnum directive does not assign a number to it. But it means Sphinx does not treat it as section.

[tk0miya]

I don't know this is a specification or not. But it seems difficult to support it to me.

[tk0miya]

I'm closing this because this is intentional change of Sphinx.
Thanks,