Re: Release Notes: Markdown to replace QBK

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2023-02-17 20:22:45

On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 12:14 PM Andrey Semashev via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Please no. Markdown is a very limited and poorly documented format.

Well, I have more bad news for you. Quickbook is unmaintained as is
its required Boostbook support. If you think Markdown is unpopular (it
isn't) you should see how many projects outside of Boost use
Quickbook. Long-term I am moving to Asciidoc and focusing my energy on
making sure that Boost authors who want to use Asciidoc have an easy
time of it, and get great results.

> Also, I oppose to having preference to GitHub or any other particular
> service provider in basic Boost facilities, such as documentation format.

"Github flavored markdown" is not tied to GitHub it just became so
insanely popular that it is a widely used dialect. Python's markdown
processing tools for example use Github flavored markdown.

> Boost should be easy to move between service providers.

Fortunately this proposal doesn't change the ease of movement, but I
generally disagree with this statement.

Making "Boost easy to move between service providers" has a cost, and
that cost is paid by everyone on a continuous basis. Moving to another
service provider also has a cost, but it is a singular event with
extremely low frequency. Since the majority of our energy is spent on
not-moving-to-other-service-provider things, we can afford to make
switching service providers expensive as long as we get great value
from not worrying about ease of movement.

Thanks