[poppler] A question about xpdf

[Svante Signell]

Hello,

I'm a user of xpdf, which I like a lot for viewing and printing PDF
documents. The latest release of xpdf was 3.0.3 August 15 2011 (by Glyph
& Cog, LLC). Recently the latest patched version in GNU/Debian is having
serious bugs and is removed from testing, i.e. it will no longer be part
of Jessie when it is released. In my opinion it is a pity that it
disappears, even if other PDF viewers are available. The main reason for
not working any longer is that the PDF rendering backend conflicts with
libpoppler, which is currently used also for xpdf. The problem is
between some classes and functions in xpdf and poppler.

Looking at the webpage for poppler, the description makes this conflict
clear: "Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code
base." So the classes in poppler are newer versions of parts of the xpdf
code, converted to a library. Finding the problems of a disappearing
xpdf annoying (Debian popcon shows 10 000 installations) I managed to
clear out conflicting and redundant code (some work still needed) to
make it run again. Since the changes were so large, Debian people did
not want to carry this kind of patches, since Debian Maintainers
normally package upstream source code, forward patches upstream, and
carry Debian-specific patches.

Their recommendation was to contact you, in case I take over the
responsibility for xpdf as a new (forked) upstream. My question is if
you allow me to reuse the name xpdf for a stripped-off version using
poppler as backend, otherwise another name has to be chosen. Of course,
if xpdf could again be a package with poppler (Glyph & Cog, LLC)?) as
upstream would be the best solution. In that case I will gladly submit
my patches here.

Best regards,
Svante Signell