[csw-maintainers] xpdf, poppler, going forward.

Philip Brown phil at bolthole.com
Mon Apr 12 23:25:06 CEST 2010


On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Benjamin von Mossner <benny at opencsw.org> wrote:

> Phil, any answer on this? I know tha package is downgrade
> but thats not a final solution, is it?
>

well, actually, Roger was nice enough to repackage soon after the downgrade.
So that part is handled.

However, now there is a question of, "how do we handle the rest of it?"

The issue at the core of this, is that it has been suggested that
(lib)poppler, if installed, makes for a "better" renderer than xpdf.

The thought, which both Dagobert and I have suggested, is that, if it
makes sense, you might repackage both xpdf, and the utils, to make use
of "alternatives", and then
xpdf would point to the "regular", xpdf implementation by default, but
then get auto-redirected to the poppler implementation, if that was
installed.

A few things have to happen, for that to be possible.

1. You would both have to AGREE "poppler is better" :)
2. you would move the xpdf binaries (both xpdf, and utils), to something like
    /opt/csw/libexec/xpdf/xxxxxx, and register all of then through
"alternatives"
3. Roger would do the same with the matching "poppler" binaries,
setting the "alternatives" priority as higher than the xpdf entries

4. you resubmit your stuff, he resubmits "CSWpoppler" (leaving
CSWlibpoppler unchanged)
and there we go.


However... if you disagree that poppler is always better... Then we
need to discuss further on here.


More information about the maintainers mailing list