Build against the SyncTeX shared library if available

[Benjamin Eltzner]

Hi, a bug was reported in the Debian BTS:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=754138

"qpdfview currently contains a copy of synctex parser from texlive-bin. This code is now provided as shared library by libsynctex1/libsynctex-dev. Please consider using the shared library instead of the embedded copy."

Since the shared library version of synctex seems to be quite recent and apparently it has not yet been adopted anywhere outside Debian, I think a compile time option would be great for the time being.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello Benjamin,

I think this will become a Won't Fix for the time being since the shared library is not part of any upstream TeXLive release yet but is built by Debian as a distribution patch. Even though, there have been corresponding commits within the upstream repository [1], the naming of libraries and pkg-config modules differs so that I am not yet willing to commit this to my trunk. Or did I misinterpret the situation?

I will however provide you with a possible patch that the Debian package can carry for now. I could not test it since I can't access a corresponding TeXLive installation outside of Debian unstable, but I think it won't work since the pkg-config metadata shipped by Debian tries to link to "libsynctex_parser.so" but installs "libsynctex.so". (Maybe I just misunderstood something, not sure there.) In any case, I try to detect whether a package is installed via "pkg-config" and if so link with it instead of building the inline version of the SyncTeX parser, so the migration should be completely automatic as soon as correct pkg-config files are shipped. (But again, naming seems to differ upstream with the pkg-config files even missing for now.)

Best regards, Adam.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Patch to link against SyncTeX shared library using pkg-config

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Of course, I forgot the link to the upstream repository...

[1] http://tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Build/source/texk/web2c/synctexdir/

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello again,

any news on how to correctly interpret the situation in between Debian and TeXLive? Does the attached patch work on Debian unstable?

Best regards, Adam.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Changing since to triaged since there was no more feedback and we will wait this one out until upstream TeXLive released their implementation of a dynamic SyncTeX library.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

According to [1], the public release of TeXLive 2015 is planned for the 12th of June. We'll import the latest SyncTeX parser one more time and hopefully add the correct pkg-config integration to use shared library.

[1] http://tug.org/texlive/

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello again,

I updated the included version of the SyncTeX parser to 1.18 and added building against the system library if available via pkg-config. Also, it seems like Debian and upstream TeXLive have synchronized their pkg-config files at least in Jessie.

Could you verify that trunk builds on Debian stable or higher and links against the system SyncTeX parser instead of compiling the internal version? Thank you.

Best regards, Adam.

[Adam Reichold (adamreichold)]

Hello again,

TeXLive 2015 landed in Arch Linux and qpdfview's trunk properly picked up the shared SyncTeX library, so I am guessing that this will work on Debian as well...

Best regards, Adam.