I am requesting an exception to the FeatureFreeze for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I would like qpdf 8.0.1 to be synced from debian.
I am the upstream author of qpdf and the debian maintainer. I released 8.0.0 with the explicit goal of beating the 18.04 feature freeze. It was released and uploaded to debian on February 25. Then I realized 8.0.1 a few days later (March 4) with a few very small additional enhancements. I came to learn that 8.0.0 was not synced before the deadline, so I am requesting a freeze exception. You can find 8.0.0 in debian testing and 8.0.1 in unstable. I was planning on releasing 8.0.2 with another one-line change. The changes from 8.0.0 to 8.0.2 are not fixes to bugs in 8.0.0. Both releases include small additional enhancements. For now, I am request sync of 8.0.1, which is the latest version in debian.
The qpdf package has a very strong record of stability. The principle changes in 8.0.0 were source-compatible but non-binary-compatible changes to support more advanced handling of PDF files at the lexical layer. These changes are required to support some Google summer of code work toward handling PDF forms in files being printed. qpdf is used as the backend for cups-filters. Additionally, qpdf 8.0.0 includes fixes that allow a wide range of incorrect PDF files that break in 7.1.1 to be processed as it handles more cases as recoverable rather than fatal errors. 8.0.1 adds the additional enhancement of allowing PDF files with checksum errors in their compressed data to be processed.
The risk to allowing qpdf 8 into 18.04 is minimal as qpdf has a very thorough regression test suite, and all the changes are backward compatible at the source level. The advantages of having qpdf 8 in 18.04 include handling of a wider range of incorrect files for printing and opening the door to a backport of the form handling capabilities in cups-filters should that be desired.
If possible, I would like to request an exception for 8.0.2, which I have not yet released. 8.0.2 includes only one small additional enhancement: better recovery of files that have loops in the cross reference table. Most readers can't handle such files well anyway, but evince can, and this would enable successful printing of such files from evince. It's a one line change + test suite updates. I have not released 8.0.2 but could do so at any time.
I am looking into this exception.
8.0.0 has been synced into bionic already, but it's still stuck in bionic-proposed most probably because of the ABI bump - I suppose we need to rebuild cups-filters-
Do you have an ETA on when 8.0.2 could happen?