Make boost mandatory or opt-out when building splash
The Splash backend uses boost::small_vector
for serious performance gain. But the dependency is optional opt-in which make most of the packager ignore it, including on major distro.
In a major use case, I dug into why some of the PDF upload workflow in the Internet Archive, and the answer being to simply recompile Poppler with boost didn't really fly as their server use Ubuntu and deploying something like that would be little benefit. (this was in 2020, and things could have changed since) (I'm just a user, but I investigated the issue to see if their was something I could fix in poppler)
If you made this mandatory, or opt-out, when building splash, then the chance of distribution building poppler correctly would increase.
Edit: added that's when building splash.