[tex-k] libpoppler support in TeX Live source tree

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Wed, 18 Mar 2009, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> On 18 Mar 2009, at 11:41, Norbert Preining wrote:
>>> 
>>> (4) In case you think of a complete switch, you have to give support to 
>>> have
>>> libpoppler built on all systems currently supported by TL.
>> 
>> No, complete switch is not a good idea for now because some project
>> itself do not want to switch.
>> 
>> It concerns pdftex, luatex, xetex: And I have no idea whether JK and HTH
>> want to switch themselves to poppler.
>
> I have no strong opinion about the switch itself; but I do have a concern 
> about build support and dependencies. E.g., I don't want to pull in 
> fontconfig as a dependency of poppler on all platforms, which tends to happen 
> by default.
>
> For distros that are building and packaging their own binaries, using system 
> poppler rather than in-tree xpdf makes a lot of sense. For standalone TL 
> binaries, I'm not sure it's worth the effort of bringing poppler into the TL 
> tree and ensuring it will configure and build properly in all cases.

Hi Jonathan, Norbert, Martin, Thanh, and Taco,

you guys better come to an agreement.  I can well imagine to have a
configure option to use an installed libpoppler instead of libxpdf, but that
would then be the same for all three: pdftex, luatex, and xetex.

I strictly refuse to even consider the situation where in one TL build
(configure + make + install) one program uses libxpdf and another one uses
libpoppler -- no way for such a nightmare.

Of course, one can in one build create, e.g., xetex with libxpdf and in
another build pdftex with libpoppler.  There will be, to some
extent already is, support for building just one of these programs
plus the required non-system libraries.

Regards
Peter