Hello, I'm a user of xpdf, which I like a lot for viewing and printing PDF documents. The latest release of xpdf was 3.0.3 August 15 2011 (by Glyph & Cog, LLC). Recently the latest patched version in GNU/Debian is having serious bugs and is removed from testing, i.e. it will no longer be part of Jessie when it is released. In my opinion it is a pity that it disappears, even if other PDF viewers are available. The main reason for not working any longer is that the PDF rendering backend conflicts with libpoppler, which is currently used also for xpdf. The problem is between some classes and functions in xpdf and poppler.
Looking at the webpage for poppler, the description makes this conflict clear: "Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base." So the classes in poppler are newer versions of parts of the xpdf code, converted to a library. Finding the problems of a disappearing xpdf annoying (Debian popcon shows 10 000 installations) I managed to clear out conflicting and redundant code (some work still needed) to make it run again. Since the changes were so large, Debian people did not want to carry this kind of patches, since Debian Maintainers normally package upstream source code, forward patches upstream, and carry Debian-specific patches. Their recommendation was to contact you, in case I take over the responsibility for xpdf as a new (forked) upstream. My question is if you allow me to reuse the name xpdf for a stripped-off version using poppler as backend, otherwise another name has to be chosen. Of course, if xpdf could again be a package with poppler (Glyph & Cog, LLC)?) as upstream would be the best solution. In that case I will gladly submit my patches here. Best regards, Svante Signell _______________________________________________ poppler mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/poppler
