Dear Jason, On Sat, Mar 04, 2017 at 12:00:19AM -0600, Jason Crain wrote: > 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. Thank you very much for this input, Jason. It sounds like the source should not in fact be repacked. What do you think, Svante? -- Sean Whitton
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