Sunday, March 06, 2005

Poppler

You may have noticed that recently xpdf source code has had some code auditing and some problems where found in it. And you may have noticed that meant lots of new releases, xpdf, gpdf, kpdf, koffice, cups, evince, latex(IIRC) and some more, why? you may ask. Because xpdf has not a shared lib so all the projects that want to use xpdf code have to include it in their sources. That obviously sucks for many reasons, a shared lib will be obviously better. That is where poppler comes in. Poppler is a fork of xpdf sources that installs itself as a lib other programs can use. Currently only evince is using it, but Brad Hards has some patches to make the pdf kfile_plugin use it and i've sent the poppler mailing list some patches we had in our (kpdf) sources and i hope they will be accepted, so the next time a vulnerability is found in xpdf code you'll have to update less things, a good thing (TM)