Hi everyone, I'd like to propose dropping the PDF and texinfo targets from our documentation build, or at the very least, having them not be part of the default target / not standard deliverables for the project.
We'd continue to build HTML documentation as part of the workflow, naturally, as well as the man pages. I don't have any solid numbers, but I'm fairly sure most people use https://docs.couchdb.org/ or a locally installed copy for their documentation for CouchDB rather than the PDF documentation. I personally can't remember the last time I opened the docs in PDF form. I also have never seen anyone refer to the PDF docs on the mailing lists, IRC or Slack when asking for advice or support. I've also never seen anyone use or talk about the texinfo target, and I've not used them myself. Dropping this dependency will allow us to drop TeX/LaTeX from our build chain, which speeds up build times by about 90 seconds and reduces the size of containers currently being built for our Jenkins CI workflow. It also means CouchDB devs don't have to install 0.5-1.5GB worth of toolset. I've captured this in JIRA as https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-3329 and have PRs ready to fire off if people agree. Your thoughts? -Joan
