Bug#856652: RFS: xpdf/3.0.4.real-4
On Fri, Mar 03, 2017 at 11:29:44AM +0100, Svante Signell wrote:
> I am looking for a sponsor for my ITA package "xpdf"
If you're going to adopt the Xpdf package, I thought you might want to
know a little about Xpdf first and why the Debian package is the way
that it is. The Debian package modifies Xpdf to make it use poppler
(https://poppler.freedesktop.org) for rendering instead of using it's
own internal code. I think this was done for security and bug fixes,
and because the poppler upstream is more responsive than Xpdf.
Poppler is a fork of Xpdf. Before poppler, it was common for
applications which wanted to read PDFs to embed a copy of the Xpdf code.
Poppler was created to turn sections of the Xpdf code into a library so
that it could be more easily reused, to have a centralized place for
development, and to put APIs over the code.
Debian's Xpdf is significantly different from upstream Xpdf. The
package has build rules and patches which modify the code to be
compatibile with poppler. Also, since the poppler devs do not guarantee
stability for the old Xpdf functions, because those functions were never
intended to be a stable interface, the patches will occasionally need to
be modified to match any changes in poppler.
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