State of Pillar

Hi all, due to the current state of the world I'm trying to spend some time helping with the Pharo books on the SquareBracketsAssociate's GitHub site (editing, contributing, etc.)

I am very familiar with LaTeX, but I see that almost everything is using Pillar now. So I figured I would jump in and give Pillar a try. I've come to a screeching halt. Well, almost. I'm being dramatic, but the process has been a bit frustrating. Here's a small list of some of the frustrations I'm facing:

1. Most of the books appear to have been written in an older version of Pillar (7.7.4 according to the main page of the pillar-markup site, but I'm not sure how true this is).

2. After generating Html versions of several books (using 'pillar build html') I get readable output, but none of the chapters are numbered. This happens with existing book(lets) and also when I create a brand new book from the book archetype. I tried v8.0.2, then downgraded to 7.7.5, then to 7.7.4, and did not see any changes - I still have no chapter numbers. Perhaps I need to go back even further? If so, how can I tell which version of Pillar the last successful build of a booklet was created with? (other than comparing last publish dates with release dates of Pillar, and am I heading into dependency hell by installing older versions of Pillar?)

3. Pdf output halts with an error and doesn't even build. I'm getting errors related to OSSUnixSubprocess, so I'm assuming it's having trouble with my texlive config - I see some scripts have hardcoded texlive as being installed in the home folder (of which mine is not - I'm using ubuntu 19.10 with a standard texlive install).

4. The releases tab for most of the booklets sometimes contains a pdf, but most of the time, it doesn't. I'm sure it has to do with changes in the CI process over the years, but I would think this should be an important consistency to maintain?

Anyway, I get it; it's a complicated tool (Pillar), and to produce Pdf, Html, whatever-custom-output-you-want, from a single source is no simple task. However, if we are to improve the situation, we need to improve the process and bring all the booklets up to date using pillar v8.0.X. Also, not an easy task and time-consuming.

I'm willing to give some time to this, but I don't see any documentation for Pillar v8.0.X? Or much for any previous versions, either? Especially useful would be a document describing the differences in Pillar markup from previous versions. I see a chapter in Enterprise Pharo (pillar 4.0, I believe?), and two booklets (one outdated, one not so much). Neither of the booklets are produced with 100% correct output using pillar v8.0.2. What happened to pillar 5 and 6?

There was also a mention in the Pillar booklet about a pillarhub open-access shared blog, but the link seems to be dead? http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/ (I think pharocloud.com is long gone, no?)

Can anyone point me to some recent docs on Pillar? If I have to read the source and figure things out myself, I'm willing to, but I guess I'm asking if anyone else is working on this stuff, is there a wiki, or has it been abandoned? Is it worth the effort to create yet another markdown-based publishing system? There are plenty in use already that might allow the effort to be put into the content instead of the framework to produce the content?

My comments here are not meant as criticism in any way, just trying to get a pulse on the Pillar project, and I'd like to start committing changes to content (via pull-requests of course).

Cheers,

Stephen Smith

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