Linking TL with poppler?

[Ken Moffat]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2023 at 11:37:36PM +0200, Preuße, Hilmar wrote:
> On 13.09.2023 00:14, Karl Berry wrote:
> 
> Hi Karl,
> 
> > Hi Hilmar - certainly not a dumb question. I took out those options
> > because, due to version skew and incompatibilities, it became impossible
> > (impractical) to support.  It also creates a substantially different
> > pdftex (et al.) program, which is worrisome to me in principle.
> > 
> 
> Yes, that is is answer I expected. The poppler people still change the API
> every few releases to I understand that trying to use it is rather painful.
> 
> > Nevertheless, if you or anyone can provide maintainable patches to link
> > with poppler, I am not opposed to installing them.
> > 
> Sorry, I'm currently not in the position to help here. It was just a
> question.
> 
> @Vincent: I had a short look at mupdf. At least in Debian there is no shared
> library for mupdf, just a static library and it does not avoid the code
> duplication. As far as I understood [1] there won't be a solution for this
> soon.
> 
> Hilmar
> 
> [1] https://bugs.debian.org/719351

As a side-note (i.e. tangential to the thread), linking to poppler
seems to very much depend on exactly what you are doing, e.g.
inkscape needs frequent updates for poppler changes. OTOH, the
epdfview-gtk3 fork only links to poppler-glib and was last updated
about three years ago but still works (modulo the tests, and the
non-existant docs).  Trying to include glib and gtk3 in TeXLive
would be a fool's errand.  It's sad that poppler has become such a
pain, but like many packages it seems to have become "the one true
way, or the highway".

ĸen
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