Opened 7 years ago

Closed 5 years ago

#7034 closed defect (wontfix)

Use public poppler API

Reported by: wiz Owned by: warmerdam
Priority: normal Milestone: closed_because_of_github_migration
Component: default Version: unspecified
Severity: normal Keywords:
Cc:

Description

gdal uses the xpdf compatibility API provided by poppler.

However, upstream poppler sees this as "unsupported" and changes it when and how they want, see e.g. https://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/7033

Their view is that consumers should use one of the public APIs, i.e. the glib, qt4, qt5, or cpp ones.

Please switch gdal to use one of those. If the API provided by upstream does not fulfill gdal's needs, upstream is willing to talk (https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/poppler).

(I'm not upstream, I'm just a packager that would like to reduce future breakage.)

Change History (5)

comment:1 by Even Rouault, 7 years ago

I'm afraid this is not easily possible. GDAL really needs access to low-level PDF structure manipulation: objects, dictionaries, streams, etc. It doesn't just need to display an image. So well that could be possible if Poppler expose those API in the public API, but I'm not sure upstream poppler would be so enthousiastic about that (I might have spoken with them a few years ago, but I'm not sure), and even if they wouldn't object the idea, implement that themselves just to make GDAL happy. And honestly I don't have the funding to contribute that myself to the Poppler community.

Version 0, edited 7 years ago by Even Rouault (next)

comment:2 by wiz, 7 years ago

Upstream wasn't even aware of people really using the API that gdal is currently using, and doesn't consider changing it a problem. For that reason I suggest that you should talk to them about what you need from their stable API that at least at some point in the future a switch would be possible.

You're not the only project that breaks when poppler changes their API, but someone has to start talking to poppler about the issues, and you know gdal best :-)

comment:3 by Even Rouault, 7 years ago

comment:4 by wiz, 7 years ago

Looks good, thank you very much! I hope this will lead to a useful discussion.

comment:5 by Even Rouault, 5 years ago

Milestone: closed_because_of_github_migration
Resolution: wontfix
Status: newclosed

This ticket has been automatically closed because Trac is no longer used for GDAL bug tracking, since the project has migrated to GitHub. If you believe this ticket is still valid, you may file it to https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues if it is not already reported there.

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