Packaging acrotex with TeX Live

[Henri Menke]

On 12/10/20, 11:41, Jim Diamond via tex-live wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 11:08 (+0200), Zdenek Wagner wrote:
> 
> > po 12. 10. 2020 v 9:56 odesílatel Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> napsal:
> 
> >> Am Sun, 11 Oct 2020 15:35:37 -0600 schrieb Karl Berry:
> 
> >>> Ulrike: I know the standard is open, but if the practical reality is
> >>> that it is only nonfree software that supports feature XYZ, it wouldn't
> >>> be right to include packages whose main purpose is to deal with feature
> >>> XYZ.  This has always been the case with TeX Live (and teTeX and tex-k
> >>> before that).
> 
> 
> >> Sure but the fact that the standard is open since quite some time
> >> means that the probability that only "nonfree viewers" supports  a
> >> feature requested by enough people is quite low. And as expected
> >> searching a bit gives lots of hits outside adobe.
> 
> > Unfortunately this is not the case. The Linux version of Acrobat
> > Reader 9 depends on obsolete libraries, their support was discontinued
> > a few years ago and can no longer be installed.
> 
> That is not true.  I recently got Acrobat reader 9.5.5 running on
> Slackware64-current (which is very up to date, unlike Slackware 14.2,
> the most recent "released" version of Slackware).  To get it running
> there I needed to install some 32-compatibility stuff (which, as I
> understand it, many 64-bit Linux distributions install by default),
> but that was about it.

Even if you can run Adobe Reader 9.5.5, you definitely shouldn't.  It
has tons of unfixed code execution vulnerabilities.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-497/version_id-124630/Adobe-Acrobat-Reader-9.5.html

It is also vulnerable to a whole class of information exfiltration
attacks.

https://www.pdf-insecurity.org/

Cheers, Henri

> 
> I don't know if you said earlier which Linux distro / version you use,
> but perhaps installing Acroread is not as impossible as you think.
> 
> Having said that, I agree it would be nice if Adobe would create an
> updated version for Linux.
> 
>                                 Jim