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

[Frank Küster]

"Thanh Han The" <hanthethanh at gmail.com> wrote:

> My vote is to have pdftex linked statically against xpdf
> codes, and apply relevant patches to the xpdf codes in the
> source tree of pdftex if needed. The responsibity should be
> on the pdftex team to verify and apply any patch if needed.

What do you mean with "pdftex team"?  The developers on
ntg-pdftex at ntg.nl?  Are you really willing to take this responsibility?
In a timely manner?  Also for old versions which might still be
supported by distributors?

For Debian, that would currently be 1.10b, 1.21a, 1.30.4 and 1.40.1.

> yes, this is little (if at all) related to pdftex, since I
> didn't talk about pdftex in this case but xpdf. From the
> perspective of an end Debian user, it doesn't look good when
> the distro I use provides xpdf binary that segfaults and the
> original one from Derek (with the same version) doesn't.
> Which raises the question: do the patches provided by
> distros really improve xpdf?

I don't know which patches are applied to xpdf and why.  But usually
there's a reason for such fixes, and on the other hand it's okay to
question this decision.

But I still don't get how that is relevant in this discussion.  Do you
want to draw an analogy "if distributors' patches for xpdf lower the
quality, so will patches to pdftex"?

> As you mentioned above, since I cannot afford the time to
> learn and understand all xpdf and poppler code and related
> patches, I have to trust someone who understands xpdf best
> and is responsible for xpdf. 

Ah, so it's not going to be you who does the verifying you claimed above
should be done by the pdftex team?  Who else?

> For me it's the xpdf author,
> Derek, and not the poppler maintainers, sorry. If a serious
> problem with xpdf is found, I believe Derek would deal with
> it in the way that is best to him, since after all it's also
> his interest to have xpdf reliable.

In the past, we never got any help from Derek in creating patches for
old versions.  

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)