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

[George N. White III]

On 5/8/07, Dr. Werner Fink <werner at suse.de> wrote:

> just to be noted, I've detected some pointer issues which
> cause XeTeX to fail on e.g. ppc64 and s390x.  The problem
> is that a cast from long to int will loose the four lower
> bytes due to the natural nature of the memory management
> of big endian systems.  I've attached a patch which fix this
> issue and get XeTeX on work on ppc64 and s390x.

TL2007 xetex seems to work on SGI IRIX64 (MIPS big endian), but
it is compiled for n32 so avoids some potential problems.

> Next is that I've found during debugging a lot of mixed
> long and int assignments which may also cause trouble
> e.g. in high memory loaded ia64 systems due to the large
> address spaces for virtual memory handling.  IMHO this
> should be fixed overall the source code not only the XeTeX.

Does ia64 support something similar to the IRIX64 n32 mode?

> One wish I'd like to put here around: is there a way to use
> libpoppler instead of xpdf?  This would allow to use the
> system libpoppler and reduce any maintenance effort in any
> case of a security leak in xpdf/poppler because only the
> system libpoppler has to be replaced.  For the current
> libpoppler and XeTeX I've to disable the pdftosrc utility
> because I've found no way to use this together with libpoppler.

Didn't debian have a patch to use poppler with pdftosrc?
<http://lists.debian.org/debian-tetex-maint/2005/12/msg00291.html>
(or is this linked to the ia64 port?)

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia