Hi,
On 2013-12-16 01:47, Klaus Ethgen wrote:
Am So den 24. Nov 2013 um 14:50 schrieb Vincent Lefevre:
On 2013-11-23 18:52:29 -0500, Michael Gilbert wrote:
> This seems to work now that fontconfig 2.11.0-2 has been uploaded.
> This can probably be fixed with a depends fontconfig (>=
2.11.0-2).
That's annoying because this means that there is no longer any
workaround to get xpdf running.
Well, there is. I did build new packages of libfontconfig with the
patch
from Michael Gilbert applied. This worked fine until this würgarround
here that again breaks xpdf.
[...]
To emphasize it again, the version 0.18.4-10 did break xpdf even more
than libfontconfig!
Seriously: the current xpdf in Debian is totally broken, and it has
been
for years even before the recent changes in fontconfig and/or poppler;
those just uncovered even more the nonsense the current xpdf is.
The current xpdf in Debian is compiled with a totally fragile hack,
that
is picking the original Xpdf sources, patching them for the newer
Poppler API and then "stripping away" the sources (with some cp and
sed)
that are "common" with Poppler (Poppler is a fork of Xpdf, too).
This poses a number of issues:
1) symbols conflicts with Poppler (#658264), totally misdiagnosed and
mishandled
2) the recent breakage (#727070), which may very well be another effect
of the above issue
3) compatibility with just a precise stable serie of Poppler (now
0.18.x),
with #679896 and #719224 currently asking for recent versions
4) just rebuilding Poppler, even with changes not even touching the
main
libpoppler library (like poppler/0.18.4-9 and -10) breaks xpdf,
while I'm not aware of issues in any other poppler-using package
(not even those using the private libpoppler directly)
As you can see, its maintainer (Michael Gilbert) is doing next to
nothing
to fix them, other than rejecting patches, tagging bugs as "help"
(because
he says to have no time for xpdf), and trying to NMU nonsense patches
in other sources (#728444, with the NMU delayed because of "emotional
messages", not because of realizing the patch was totally broken...
WTH).
Currently xpdf is out of Jessie (the next release), and will be until
the
(2) above is fixed (at least), which may be even today or in years...
Also, (3) can be (due to unattented patches nor even own porting work)
another reason for xpdf nto keeping up with newer Poppler versions.
All in all: my strong suggestion is to stop using xpdf, at least the
version
currently "shipped" in Debian unstable, until it is fixed (and kept in
shape
over time) by the current "maintainer" or by a new one.
Luckly there are plenty of PDF viewers in Debian to choose from, with
various
UIs, dependencies, functionalities and so forth.
--
Pino Toscano
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