Re: Discussion - non-free software removal
On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 11:12:01AM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 11:51:13PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> > However there are still some necessary non-free packages. Some of the xpdf
> > add-on language support packages, particularly xpdf-japanese,
> > xpdf-chinese-* etc are in non-free because they include CMap (character
> > map) files from Adobe. Without these packages some PDF files are
[...]
> Is there not sufficient documentation to enable someone (with sufficient
> motivation) to create free replacements for these character map files?
I don't know.
> > The latest Xpdf (2.00) uses Motif. The binaries in the xpdf-reader package
> > are linked with LessTif but unfortunately it works quite a bit better with
> > Open Motif from non-free. For some PDFs in some locales, Xpdf segfaults.
> > It may be worth creating an xpdf-reader-openmotif package for contrib.
> > Here's another case of no free working solution.
>
> Here's another case where use of non-free software is being proposed as an
> alternative to fixing free software. xpdf works quite well on a majority of
> documents; is it not preferable to fix the remaining cases, rather than to
> spend time on Open Motif, or (worse) some obnoxious acroread installer?
There are some bugs in Xpdf and then there are some bugs in LessTif that
the new version is using. It behaves better with Open[sic] Motif than
current versions of LessTif. As the packager, I can build an
xpdf+openmotif package in an hour or two, but I wouldn't have a clue
where to start fixing bugs in LessTif.
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
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