[poppler] Question on policy w.r.t. code modernization

[Carlos Garcia Campos]

Adam Reichold <adam.reichold at t-online.de> writes:

> Hello,

Hi, 

> remembering how I tried to push some minor optimizations to GooString
> some time ago, I wanted to ask about the project's policy on how to
> handle code modernizations in the future.
>
> To me, it seems like stuff that is pervasive like GooList or GooString
> is unlikely to be changed with the currently available man power due to
> the risk of regressions. One way of resolving this is IMHO to try to
> remove the code completely and replace it with externally maintained and
> highly optimized components, e.g. using std::vector and std::string from
> the standard library instead of GooList and GooString. But this will
> probably make it rather hard to merge xpdf changes in the future. Then
> again, this seems to be hardly happening as is.

Merging xpdf changes is already hard enough, and we don't have enough
people to do it either. The proof is that we haven't merged the xpdf
3.04 changes yet. So, I'm in favor of diverging from xpdf code to
modernize it, if people think it's important for the maintenance of the
project in the long term and we have volunteers to do it of course. We
can still check the xpdf changes on every release to try to fix bugs. I
don't think it will be much harder than what it already is.

> So I guess that basically, my question is on the opinions of the
> maintainers to detach the Poppler code base from the xpdf code base as a
> prerequisite to thoroughly modernizing it. Related to this is the
> question on whether raising the language standard to C++11 or C++14 is
> considered possible.

Probably C++11, but maybe we would need to limit the features we can use
depending on the compilers (and their versions) we want to support. If we
are going to modernize the code, I think it's very important to first
write detailed coding style guidelines and enforce them.

> Best regards, Adam.
>
>
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Regards,
-- 
Carlos Garcia Campos
PGP key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x523E6462
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