retitle 252104 please provide a shared library thanks Hi Hamish,
When I first submitted that bug I was young and foolish. I might have grown, being less foolish than before, but the desire to have a libxpdf has also grown - especially in the last weeks with all those security issues in xpdf. I guess you are aware that xpdf code is being used in a lot of packages, and this is a security nightmare. It's not only that there are many packages - each ships a slightly different version (0.92 in woody's tetex, 1.0whatever in some other woody package I forgot, 2.01 in sarge's tetex, and so on). For sarge, it might get even worse, because there are slightly different patches around for some of the vulnerabilities, and if maintainers have chosen differently, future patches might not apply cleanly to all packages. Cupsys has recently switched to using the binaries from xpdf-utils, but this is not an option for some other packages, like tetex. For these reasons, I would really like to see something like libxpdf, and I think we should contact upstream about this. How are your relations to them? I couldn't find any public devel mailinglist on a first glance, else I would have checked myself if the question was already discussed there. Do you think they might be willing to do such a change? Note that there is already some code - besides libGoo.a, libsplash.a and libfofi.a which are generated also by the xpdf package, teTeX additionally creates a libxpdf.a. The changed Makefile that does this can be downloaded from http://cvs.debian.org/tetex-bin/libs/xpdf/xpdf/Makefile.in?rev=1.3.2.3&cvsroot=tetex&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup (this version is only in the experimental branch). Kind regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
