[tlbuild] Build problem using system poppler library (0.20.1)

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2012, Ken Brown wrote:

> When I build TeX Live 2012 for the Cygwin distribution using 
> --with-system-poppler and --with-system-xpdf, the build fails as follows:
>
> ...
>
> /home/kbrown/src/cygtexlive/texlive/texlive-20120611-1/src/texlive-20120611-source/texk/web2c/pdftexdir/pdftosrc.cc:137:26: 
> error: ?class XRef? has no member named ?getSize?
>
> This is due to the following poppler change:
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/commit/?h=poppler-0.20&id=33aded82fbd98832eaab7cb7487fe6a1c7ef15f5
>
> The attached patch seems to fix the problem, but I don't know if it's the 
> right fix or if it would cause problems for the native TL build.

Hi Ken,

Ouch, another change in poppler's xpdf headers; we have been warned that this
API is not supported by poppler and that we use it at our own risk.

I have not yet experimented with poppler-0.20.1 (from 2012-06-10) because
that might have interfered with the TL'12 freeze.

Your patch might work for the moment, but could give wrong results according
to the commit message.  The proper way would be to either require
system-xpdf to be poppler >=0.21.1 or to test in configure.ac for the
presence of XRef::getSize.

> The problem didn't occur with the native TL build, because that build 
> included libs/xpdf/xpdf-3.03/xpdf/XRef.h instead of 
> libs/poppler/poppler-0.20.0/poppler/XRef.h.
>
> Is it intentional that the native TL build prefers the xpdf version over the 
> poppler version?

This is intentional: a native TL build is for the TL DVD and similar and
must not use any system libraries (other than fontconfig). In addition
poppler has some LFS problems absent for xpdf (see README.config 1.6 and
3.1).

Regards
Peter