[tex-live] TeXLive2007: Bug in (Xe)TeX for 64bit and big endianess

Thanh Han The hanthethanh at gmail.com
Tue May 8 22:35:34 CEST 2007


I also never wanted poppler instead of xpdf and never voted
for it. I doubt very much it would bring any advantage at
all, while the problems it caused are quite obvious.

I am a debian user myself. There was a time when my xpdf
segfaulted for a certain pdf. I reported the problem to
Derek and then we found out that the problem happened only
with the binaries provided by debian. Of course it's not
hard to guess what was Derek's reaction then.


Thanh

On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 08:46:30PM +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
> Karl Berry wrote:
> >Is there some technical advantage of poppler?  A priori, why wouldn't
> >you expect just as many security problems in poppler as xpdf?  My
> >experience is that the xpdf author is very responsive, so I am surprised
> >to hear of you not wanting to use it
> since pdftex is supposed to behave consistently cross platform (same tex
> engine as well as pdf generation/inclusion behaviour), xpdf is the
> official pdf library used in pdftex (and luatex);
>
> i share your observation with regards to responsiveness
>
> of course one could use whatever library one wants but that's up to the
> responsibility of the distributer and not of the team; if it does not
> spoil the code base, multiple libraries can be supported, but as said,
> the de facto standard pdf lib is the xpdf one
> >.
> >
> >Not that I'm opposed to supporting both, of course, just seem like a
> >priority IMHO.
> >
> >Of course, the question of using the system version is independent of what
> >is used.
> >You'll have to compile your own and avoid the static linking
> >which we absolutely do want for the distributed TL binaries.
> >
> we already had reports of users unable to compile pdftex because of
> dependencies of poppler (and no xpdf source being shipped) which imo is a
> bad omen
> anyhow, with regards to pdftex/luatex dev, the relevant library code is (to
> be) part of the source tree so that users can compile the standard
> distribution themselves
> (btw, i wonder how serious security issues are with respect to the used
> libraries - we use only part of xpdf)
> Hans
>
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