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boostbook documentation is at serious risk of becoming impossible to use

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
20/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
java

Research direction

Start by reviewing the BoostBook setup scripts duplicated into the Ubuntu Bionic Docker environment and the listed docbook-xsl, docbook-xml, and FOP dependencies. Determine whether supported versions can replace them or whether another documentation system is needed; done means the documentation build no longer depends on the identified obsolete tools.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I would have opened an "issue" on the boostorg/boostbook project, however, that is not enabled.

I have been duplicating the boostbook setup scripts into the docker setup environment for Ubuntu Bionic and I have found that all of the packages that boostbook depends on are ancient.

Package Version Last Modified Host
docbook-xsl 1.75.2 2009 SourceForge
docbook-xml 4.2 2002 oasis-open.org
fop 0.94 2007 Apache

These tools are quite old and it is only a matter of time before the older versions could be removed. These external sites are under no particular requirement to keep these older versions of software available. At some point some of these tools may no longer work with current operating system tools, for example fop says that it is for "JDK 1.4".

Each of these tools has a newer version. A project should be initiated to modernize the documentation build to use the latest versions of these tools, or switch to another documentation system perhaps (I saw a discussion on the mailing list).

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4
Forks
6
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

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First steps

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