[R-pkg-team] Bug#991566: r-cran-bookdown is so old that it fails to even start

[Martin Quinson]

retitle 991566 r-cran-bookdown: Please package version 0.25
severity 991566 grave
thanks

Hello,

I just followed the instructions given at https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/get-started.html but I installed the debian version of the packages instead. 
The command `Rscript -e "bookdown::render_book('index.Rmd', 'bookdown::gitbook')"` gives me the following error message:

```
output file: bookdown-demo.knit.md

/usr/bin/pandoc +RTS -K512m -RTS bookdown-demo.utf8.md --to html4 --from markdown+autolink_bare_uris+tex_math_single_backslash --output bookdown-demo.html --lua-filter /usr/lib/R/site-library/bookdown/rmarkdown/lua/custom-environment.lua --lua-filter /usr/lib/R/site-library/rmarkdown/rmarkdown/lua/pagebreak.lua --lua-filter /usr/lib/R/site-library/rmarkdown/rmarkdown/lua/latex-div.lua --metadata-file /tmp/RtmpeK0v3x/filedc634e3f7795 --wrap preserve --standalone --section-divs --table-of-contents --toc-depth 3 --template /usr/lib/R/site-library/bookdown/templates/gitbook.html --highlight-style pygments --number-sections --css style.css --include-in-header /tmp/RtmpeK0v3x/rmarkdown-strdc63614fa11d.html --mathjax --filter /usr/bin/pandoc-citeproc 
Error in move_files_html(output, lib_dir) : 
  object 'is_abs_path' not found
Calls: <Anonymous> ... render_cur_session -> <Anonymous> -> <Anonymous> -> move_files_html
Execution halted
```

I reported this bug upstream, but they closed it saying that the bookdown package is ways too old to be of any use, and that I should install the package directly instead. They are right in some sense, but I'd prefer to use the Debian packages if possible.
https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo/issues/67

Could you please update the package? I'm tagging the bug as grave since the package seems unusable as is.

Thanks in advance,
Mt