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

[Hans Hagen]

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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