Bug 2188328

Summary:	texlive-pdftex requires xpdf (but shouldn't)
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Peter Simonyi <rhbz>
Component:	texlive-base	Assignee:	Tom "spot" Callaway <spotrh>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	unspecified	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	38	CC:	spotrh, than
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Last Closed:	2023-05-01 02:32:34 UTC	Type:	Bug
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Description Peter Simonyi 2023-04-20 13:39:26 UTC

Description of problem:
Installing texlive brings in xpdf, but there seems to be no need for this (it also wasn't required in previous versions).  It seems to be specifically texlive-pdftex that requires it.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
svn64690-71.fc38.x86_64

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install texlive-pdftex
2. Look at the required packages being installed with it (or the new GUI applications available after install)

Actual results:
xpdf is installed.


Expected results:
xpdf is not installed

Comment 1 Tom "spot" Callaway 2023-04-28 19:05:07 UTC

So, you're half right here. Previous texlive builds were patched to use poppler as the PDF rendering library for pdftex, but upstream stopped supporting that and Fedora's attempts to patch it in anyways were causing a significant number of crashes and rendering issues that no one else had. Upstream instead moved to a bundled copy of xpdf, but since bundling is strongly discouraged in Fedora, Fedora moved to using the libraries from the xpdf package, specifically, libxpdfcore.so.4. That library currently lives in the "xpdf" package, along with the GUI app.

It would be possible to split the xpdf libs into a "xpdf-libs" subpackage which both texlive-pdftex and xpdf could depend on. xpdf being relatively small is the reason I hadn't done this, but I can see how you might not want another GUI app on a system.

I'll split it out and push out an xpdf update. Notably, this won't remove xpdf from your system, but once xpdf-libs is present, you should be able to remove xpdf yourself without breaking texlive-pdftex.

Comment 2 Fedora Update System 2023-04-28 20:04:01 UTC

FEDORA-2023-7adbec748f has been submitted as an update to Fedora 38. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-7adbec748f

Comment 3 Fedora Update System 2023-04-29 05:09:00 UTC

FEDORA-2023-7adbec748f has been pushed to the Fedora 38 testing repository.
Soon you'll be able to install the update with the following command:
`sudo dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing --refresh --advisory=FEDORA-2023-7adbec748f`
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2023-7adbec748f

See also https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for more information on how to test updates.

Comment 4 Peter Simonyi 2023-04-30 14:14:28 UTC

(In reply to Tom "spot" Callaway from comment #1)

Ah, I didn't realize xpdf was more than just a pdf viewer.

Yes, with Gnome 3 presenting all GUI apps together in a grid, it's the "I already have a PDF viewer I like" rather than the size -- TeX is huge anyway.

Thanks for the quick change!

Comment 5 Fedora Update System 2023-05-01 02:32:34 UTC

FEDORA-2023-7adbec748f has been pushed to the Fedora 38 stable repository.
If problem still persists, please make note of it in this bug report.