[boost] Why is the boost documentation so bad?

Subject: [boost] Why is the boost documentation so bad?
From: Florian Lindner (mailinglists_at_[hidden])
Date: 2017-09-08 02:21:47

Hello,

I really love to use boost libraries in my project, but I always wonder, for such an accomplished project, why is the
documentation so bad?

A few examples:

I want to get familiar with http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_65_1/libs/ptr_container/. What do I need to include? Neiter
the tutorial, the reference or the usage guidelines mention a #include line. This is something which stroke me quite
often at various boost libs.

Also with the ptr_container lib, I want to find the refrence for the ptr_vector::insert function. I got to scan the
reference pages of all members of it's class hierarchy to find the insert() function (it's in ptr_sequence_adapter).

References and example code often have no syntax highlightning and no linking and it's extremely hard to find
documentation for a specific symbol, or from there, to jump to the source code.

I would really like to have a more uniform and a documentation that not feels like a annotated source code dump.

I use doxygen for my own projects and I know it can generate nicely looking, with syntax highlightning and linked
documentation.

Please, don't take this offensive, it's just some feedback I wanted to give a long time.

Best,
Florian