Comment 22 for bug 26650

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:20:34 +0100
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Frank_K=FCster?= <email address hidden>
To: =?iso-8859-1?q?Rog=E9rio_Brito?= <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, Martin Pitt <email address hidden>,
        <email address hidden>
Subject: poppler as a replacement for xpdf code (was: Bug#342292: Fwd: Re:
 [vendor-sec] xpdf update - patch wrong?)

Rog=E9rio Brito <email address hidden> wrote:

> On Dec 08 2005, Martin Pitt wrote:
>> (who really wishes upstreams would switch to poppler after uploading
>> 22 security update packgages)
>
> Yes, but poppler is still not exactly a complete replacement for
> xpdf---at least, that is what I understand from this bug of mine:
> http://bugs.debian.org/340379

One single bug need not mean that the library is not generally usable;
especially if it's "only" about viewing.

But the real concern that I have is whether the poppler people do
actually intend to become a "libxpdf". My impression from looking at
their homepage (a while ago, though) was that they wanted to create
something new on top of xpdf - a unified viewing and printing tool for
the desktop, based on pdf. But many projects that use xpdf code have a
different interest in xpdf: They use it for parsing, analysing and
manipulating PDF files, which is different from a user's point of view,
and I don't know whether it's also different from a developer's.

My concern is that if pdftex, pdftk, pdftohtml et al. start using
libpoppler now they might find in the future that libpoppler does not
all they need, or does not give proper support for them, because of its
different goal. I'd be very glad to hear that this not realistic, and
if I am such advised, I would be happy to create a patch for pdftex to
use poppler and submit it upstream.

Regards, Frank
--=20
Frank K=FCster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Z=FCrich
Debian Developer