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

[Frank Küster]

"John R. Culleton" <john at wexfordpress.com> wrote:

> On Wednesday 09 May 2007 05:33, Hans Hagen wrote:
>> Frank � wrote:
>> > So we're left with fixing the bugs, but that is, unfortunately,
>> > *not* just a question of taking the xpdf patch, applying it to
>> > the sources and recompiling the packages.  [...]
>>
> I am as usual confused. On my Slackware Linux system xpdf is just one 
> of several available pdf viewers. I much prefer kpdf (KDE) or when it 
> works Acrobat Reader. 
>
> Is this thread discussing something else?

Yes, xpdf is more than a viewer.  It's also a code resource, many
projects took source code from it and used it in their own, pdf-parsing
or pdf-displaying applications.  That's the classical situation for a
shared library: Have the code in one project where everyone else can use
it.  xpdf's upstream author, Derek Noonburg, has refused to create such
a shared library, but the poppler team forked xpdf to do just that -and
they have also altered the code a bit.

And now the question is whether to switch to the poppler library, allow
for both (with a configure-time switch) or stay with xpdf.  Actually, if
Martin Schröder comes up with his patch, the answer will be "allow for
both". 

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