Bug#977182: xpopple as new upstream for Debian's xpdf?
Hi Florian,
On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 11:18:48AM +0100, Florian Schlichting wrote:
> This has been enormously helpful for my recent upload, thanks a ton!
No problem -- I started xpopple originally because it was the easiest
way to submit some fixes for the config parser in Debian xpdf, and I
should probably have pushed some of my more recent patches your way as
well!
I'd be very happy for you (or other distributors) to use xpopple as the
upstream for the xpdf 3 package. It certainly seems like it'd be easier
for you than patching the original code, which has now diverged
considerably from poppler.
> Do you think xpopple is ready for that?
I think so...
I try to maintain xpopple so it'll always build against the latest
release of poppler, and all released versions back to poppler 0.26
(which was the version in Debian stable when I started xpopple, so it
should cover all maintained Debian versions for backporting).
So far this has worked OK. I can't rule out the poppler authors making
future changes to the API that would be more difficult to deal with,
though. (It's a pity that there's no easy way of moving gradually to one
of the modern Poppler APIs...)
xpopple aims to maintain the existing xpdf interface, with a few
conservative extensions in the spirit of the original program, along the
same lines as the Debian patches -- e.g. it has a couple of new
keybindings and commands.
I don't currently do releases of xpopple. Are you happy just taking a
Git version or do you need me to cut a proper release tarball from time
to time?
Would there be any advantage to mirroring the xpopple repo on Salsa?
> Are there areas where xpopple does not provide any features that
> Debian's xpdf currently offers?
I've gone through all the Debian patches today and checked that xpopple
includes them (or an equivalent), so they should be the same.
One question to ask here is what xpopple should do with command-line
arguments and configuration file options that it can't support
(usually because they control functionality that's been removed from
Poppler, e.g. Type 1 fonts). Currently it exits with an error message,
but it might be nicer for it just to continue with a warning, in case
anyone wants to keep a config file working with 3.04 and xpopple -- do
you have any thoughts? #971805 is an example of this...
Are there any files added by the Debian packaging that could be included
with xpopple (e.g. the .desktop file)?
> (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?)
I've just gone through the 3.03-3.04 diff, and merged in the handful of
changes from 3.04 that actually affect xpdf. From a user perspective the
only change is the addition of the closeWindowOrQuit command.
> 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?
I don't mind being contacted. I can't promise to address everything in
the BTS but it's got to be better than having no upstream at all :-)
Cheers,
--
Adam Sampson <ats@offog.org> <http://offog.org/>
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