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

[Jonathan Kew]

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.

JK