[poppler] Alternate path for utils/.libs?

[Jason Crain]

On 2016-06-22, Bill Hollingsworth <bill at cyn.xyz> wrote:
> I am using a system where I must install poppler in a subdirectory tree of /var.  I am using the --prefix=DIR option of ./configure to compile it.
> 
> I need to use some of the poppler utilities (e.g., pdftotext). pdftotext (in /var/task/poppler/utils) wants to write a temporary file in /var/task/poppler/utils/.libs at each run.
> 
> On the system I am using, pdftotext does not have permission to write to /var/task/poppler/utils/.libs and I am not able to give it that permission. I copied pdftotext to /tmp and pdftotext successfully created the subdirectory /tmp/.libs but does not have permission to write to it.
> 
> Those are the confines of the system I am using. Is it possible to compile poppler to use /tmp for the temporary files rather than creating a .libs subdirectory?

Have you actually installed poppler?  The behaviour you mention sounds
like the way libtool scripts set up the environment so that the correct
libraries are used by a not installed application.  But that's really
only meant to be used in a development environment.

I expect that if you have actually installed poppler, by using "make
install", that the binaries would instead be placed in somewhere like
/var/task/poppler/bin, they would be real binaries instead of libtool
scripts, and they wouldn't be trying to write to a .libs directory.