Version: 3.5.0 (using KDE KDE 3.5.0) Installed from: Compiled From Sources Although the kdegraphics' configure has a --with-poppler switch, the poppler lib is only used for the pdf meta info plugin. The old duplicated xpdf code is still used for displaying pdf documents with kpdf. Using the poppler lib instead of all this duplicated code would have many advantages: 1. security bug fixes must be done only in poppler lib (and not in all xpdf derivates) 2. same for bugfixes 3. no duplicated code I was looking for this issue because I've searched some bugs in the poppler lib and I was surprised, that xpdf still misbehaves even if I fixed the problems in the poppler library. Btw, evince uses the poppler lib since some months. ;-)
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fpoppler Poppler is worse than kpdf local copy of xpdf, i'm working to fix that, but they are not that much easy to work with. Changing kpdf to use poppler right now would mean reopening some bugs, do you want that?
Albert, Ok, I understand (partly). But what about all my arguments about the advantages? Nevertheless I don't understand completly what's the problem. Did the poppler people reject some of your patches? Btw, I know it sounds strange, but I really think it would be better to merge in a short time even if this means that some bugs will be reopened. But after a short time they will be closed and _all_ users of the poppler lib benefit from the patches and bug fixes. I think, that maintaining the same piece of code several times is very bad and will result in much duplicated work and effort. Especially for libs which work with arbitrary data which can come from anywhere and so security flaws are mostly critical. So I suggest the following compromise: 1. I'll reopen the bug and it will stay open until the transition is made 2. You create for each missing patch in poppler a bug entry there and put a reference link here into the bug. I think that creating bug entries for poppler and attaching patches would increase the possibility to get the patches in. 3. So everybody can track the progress of the migration. It would be nice to see that KDE and GNOME developers really could work together. ;-) Best regards, Christian
I have commit access to poppler cvs, i'm working on it, only that is not top priority just because it gives me A LOT of work to convince them my patches are good for no real win. yeah yeah i can sell that benefits as i did in my aKademy presentation - http://conference2005.kde.org/slides/poppler/index.html - http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Poppler+Library+Talk - but they are theoretical really And no, you can not be serious telling a mantainer to make his app have more bugs just because you think is right. Really you are not telling me nothing new. And well, i'll leave that bug open if that makes you happy
Albert: close this as WONTFIX.
All significant development activity has moved from kpdf to okular. Okular uses the poppler library.