Bug#977182: xpdf: Switch to xpopple as new upstream for Debian's xpdf?
Package: xpdf
Version: 3.04-14
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: Gianfranco Costamagna <locutusofborg@debian.org>,GOTO Masanori <gotom@debian.org>,Sebastien Bacher <seb128@ubuntu.com>,Iain Lane <laney@debian.org>
Dear people interested in Debian's xpdf,
looking at how things went with Debian's xpdf since Micheal orphaned the
package in 2016, I'm doubtful how long this is still feasible. In fact,
I thought it was already dead, when I found the xpopple repository,
which already contained all that was necessary to adapt to current
poppler (which still took several hours fighting or rather hand-patching).
I think if we want to continue to have a motif and poppler based xpdf in
Debian, we should switch to using xpopple as upstream. To this end I
wrote the below email (but failed to properly involve the bts).
This also relates to the question raised in #873951 whether we shouldn't
follow xpdf 4.x's switch to QT and related development, but given that
they're not using poppler, IMHO this is only going to be even more
complicated that continuing as before.
Florian
---------------------------------------------
From: Florian Schlichting <fsfs@debian.org>
To: Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 2020 11:18:48 +0100
Subject: xpopple as new upstream for Debian's xpdf?
Hi Adam,
the other day, when I looked into the build failures that have kept
Debian's xpdf package out of the upcoming release for several months, I
happened upon your xpopple project (http://offog.org/code/xpopple/),
which I hadn't been aware of before. It seems that since 2014, you've
been doing right what we've struggled to do in Debian: deleting obsolete
code, moving files for good instead of just for the build, applying
patches instead of fighting with an unwieldy quilt queue, and most of
all: following poppler development closely, updating xpdf accordingly
while cleaning up some legacy code. This has been enormously helpful
for my recent upload, thanks a ton!
>From my position it looks like Debian should stop what it's been
increasingly unable to accomplish properly, and instead switch over to
xpopple as its upstream source for the xpdf package.
Do you think xpopple is ready for that? Are there areas where xpopple
does not provide any features that Debian's xpdf currently offers? (I
notice you're based off xpdf 3.03, but am unable to judge which parts if
any of the 3.04 changelog apply to the part that we're still using; the
new text extractor seems to be patched out again?)
And: Are you interested to act as upstream developer for what may be a
substantial user base, which can come up with all kinds of problems and
suggestions not related to your personal use case?
(Cc the Debian bug tracker so that other people interested in xpdf can
know what's going on; I might be able to help with packaging and bug
triaging, but I've never found the time to familiarize myself with
poppler enough to know what's going on)
Looking forward to hear from you!
Florian
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