Re: intent to do a poppler transition
Hi,
sorry that I didn't answer - this mail either didn't make it to the
tetex list, or I simply missed it.
Moritz Muehlenhoff <jmm@debian.org> wrote:
> Frank Küster wrote:
> > It's completely inacceptable for pdftex to acquire a dependency on gtk
> > or qt. If using plain libpoppler turns out to be impossible, we'd
>
> Nearly 1000 packages in sid depend on glib, it's not that it's a completely
> obscure lib causing major problems. Please elaborate why that is "completely
> unacceptable".
TeX is a system targetted as well at server systems as at user systems.
We already get complaints that it requires some X libs. Therefore I
don't think it would server our users, at least this part of our users,
to add in glib and libgtk.
Moreover, before using libpoppler I asked upstream about that, and they
were generally in favor of getting rid of xpdf; their switch to poppler
is scheduled for after the next release. I wouldn't have done this if
it would have meant a long-term deviation from upstream. But I am sure
that upstream see themselves even more as committed to server admins
than we, and to users of exotic, small memory, etc. systems, too. They
will never accept pdfTeX being dependent on gtk or qt.
> > rather switch back to using our embedded xpdf copy and have 10 security
> > releases during each release cycle.
>
> Great, just unload the work onto someone else!
I'm sorry for that, and I myself had more work with security fixes in
xpdf code (*not* only in teTeX) than I'd like to have again, so I know
what we're talking about.
But I can't play upstream for a pdfTeX fork, either, and a fork it would
be if libpoppler gets more and more different from xpdf, without
aquiring a non-gui API. It's not about "I don't want to", I simply
cannot, both by time and skills, and I'm sure no one else in the TeX
Task Force would be able to step in.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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