On Sep 26, 2019, at 10:13 AM, LAHAYE Olivier olivier.lahaye@cea.fr wrote:

That would have helped me a lot if I had knew that docbook-utils-pdf would be dropped....I would have searched for an alternative long ago.

It looks like that package does a combination of xsltproc + FOP. On EL7, you can get both with:

$ sudo yum install fop libxslt

I don’t have an 8 box here to check, but I fully expect that xsltproc is in 8, being a necessary component of GNOME. It isn’t on your list of removed packages.

FOP is on that list, but it isn’t really necessary to have an RPM for it, since it’s a Java package: just get the distro, unpack it somewhere. and put its “fop” wrapper script in the PATH:

https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/

Alternately, you could rebuild Fedora’s package on CentOS 8:

https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/fop

I expect this difference means this package will move to EPEL eventually, once someone gets around to it. EPEL 8 looks rather thin compared to EPEL 7 at the moment.

You might find my documentation on multi-step DocBook processing helpful:

https://tangentsoft.com/mysqlpp/dir?name=doc/userman&ci=trunk

The tutorial on that page plus the xsltproc and fo2pdf calls in the Makefile linked to that page plus the fo2pdf script also linked on that page should amount to a complete replacement for your existing db2pdf method.

As to why Red Hat abandoned this particular package, I’d guess that this sort of multi-step processing chain is more common, being more powerful. For one thing, it gets you to HTML as well as to PDF. For another, use of XML technologies orthogonal to DocBook like XIncludes often require going the step-by-step processing route.

Also, RHEL8 is purposely paring down much of what goes into core, pushing the rest off into Software Collections, EPEL, etc. That was a major point of the original announcement back in December (?) of last year.