Proposal: Abandoning monolithic Boost documentation.

From: René Ferdinand Rivera Morell (grafikrobot_at_[hidden])
Date: 2025-04-18 16:53:58

Today, in slack, we had a discussion on problems with building the
monolithic docs. For context what I'm calling the monolithic docs are these
<https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_88_0/doc/html/libraries.html>. The main
problem that was raised is that a failure in one library causes all the
docs to disappear. That problem is due to the nature of DocBook, XSLT, and
the single monolithic generation. This is not something that can be
resolved at the build system leve. The one solution is to abandon the
monolithic build. And instead move to only having per library documentation
builds. Hence..

I am proposing we abandon the monolithic documentation build. The benefits:

* No longer missing docs from problems in individual libraries.
* It's modular. I.e. libraries would build, and include, their docs in the
modular layout.

Do note that most libraries, more than 2/3, already use modular
documentation. So technically this would be completing the modular
transition that has already been happening.

Thoughts?

-- 
-- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell
-- Don't Assume Anything  -- No Supongas Nada
-- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net