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

[Giuseppe Ghibò]

Frank Küster wrote:

> "Thanh Han The" <hanthethanh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> My vote is to have pdftex linked statically against xpdf
>> codes, and apply relevant patches to the xpdf codes in the
>> source tree of pdftex if needed. The responsibity should be
>> on the pdftex team to verify and apply any patch if needed.
>
> What do you mean with "pdftex team"?  The developers on
> ntg-pdftex at ntg.nl?  Are you really willing to take this responsibility?
> In a timely manner?  Also for old versions which might still be
> supported by distributors?
>
> For Debian, that would currently be 1.10b, 1.21a, 1.30.4 and 1.40.1.
>
>> yes, this is little (if at all) related to pdftex, since I
>> didn't talk about pdftex in this case but xpdf. From the
>> perspective of an end Debian user, it doesn't look good when
>> the distro I use provides xpdf binary that segfaults and the
>> original one from Derek (with the same version) doesn't.
>> Which raises the question: do the patches provided by
>> distros really improve xpdf?
>
> I don't know which patches are applied to xpdf and why.  But usually
> there's a reason for such fixes, and on the other hand it's okay to
> question this decision.
>
> But I still don't get how that is relevant in this discussion.  Do you
> want to draw an analogy "if distributors' patches for xpdf lower the
> quality, so will patches to pdftex"?
>
>> As you mentioned above, since I cannot afford the time to
>> learn and understand all xpdf and poppler code and related
>> patches, I have to trust someone who understands xpdf best
>> and is responsible for xpdf.
>
> Ah, so it's not going to be you who does the verifying you claimed above
> should be done by the pdftex team?  Who else?
>
>> For me it's the xpdf author,
>> Derek, and not the poppler maintainers, sorry. If a serious
>> problem with xpdf is found, I believe Derek would deal with
>> it in the way that is best to him, since after all it's also
>> his interest to have xpdf reliable.
>
> In the past, we never got any help from Derek in creating patches for
> old versions.

AFAIK Derek  usually do security patches from time to time when needed releasing patch levels
archives (of course not at the same speed of CVE advisors). Maybe the best would be to try to
convince him to build and maintain an libxpdf library (maybe with someone offering him help).

IMHO, the "pdf" external backend/engine for pdftex should be one, not the possibility
to choose whether to use poppler or xpdf, that's would produce
different version of pdftex which IMHO it's not said that
would produce the same output (yep, same PDF). Usually xpdf comes
first and then libpopper later merging the newer fix of xpdf
into (e.g. the latest official is 0.5.4, while the merging with
current xpdf 3.02 should be happening in poppler svn).

Bye
Giuseppe.