Probably everyone on ntg-pdftex also reads tex-live. However, for completeness, here is the relevant piece of the msg that I just sent to ntg-context and the tex-live list: [Using Ubuntu 6.10/i386] I couldn't apply (without rejected hunks) the Ubuntu poppler patch at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=356079 to the Debian texlive-2007-1 source. So I just removed debian/patches/30_libpoppler from the patch series, returning to using the xpdf sources that ship with pdftex. Then the texlive-2007 src pkg compiled into the many .deb's and these binary pkgs installed fine. They use libpng-1.2.8 and libc6-2.4.
If I understand that thread correctly, the use of poppler instead of xpdf is now really a requirement on both debian and ubuntu?
Right, both use libpoppler.
But at the same time, static binaries with xpdf linked in are not usable or 'not done' for some reason?
I think the reason is that xpdf and libpoppler frequently fix buffer overflows. By linking against a shared library (libpoppler) instead of against the xpdf sources, only the shared library needs to be updated, and there's no need to install new texlive binary packages. I'm not sure how much I agree with this argument. It does have downsides.
And you cannot share the binary packages between the various linuxes because there are packaging differences that cannot be resolved, at all?
Right. Library version skew. There are two libraries causing problems: libpng and libpoppler. * libpng: Norbert's texlive2007 packages are for Debian unstable and they require a libpng >= 1.2.13. Ubuntu won't be sufficiently updated until feisty (7.04, i.e. next month), and all older releases of Ubuntu use 1.2.8. That's not a problem in general because you could download the source package and recompile, but... * libpoppler. Debian and Ubuntu have decided to use libpoppler as a shared library instead of the xpdf sources included in the texlive tree already. Norbert's packages require libpoppler0c2 (which is libpoppler 0.4.5). Ubuntu hasn't used libpoppler0c2 for over a year, and they use libpoppler1, which is 0.5.x where x=1 for Dapper (6.04) and 4 for Edgy (6.10) and Feisty (7.04). So, rebuilding the source package on my system (Ubuntu 6.10) fails because my system has the libpoppler1 development library (API), which differs from libpoppler0c2 in Unicode string handling. One solution is to patch the texlive2007 tree to correctly use libpoppler1. But I don't know how to do that. Ubuntu has a patch but it is for doing the same for tetex-3.0, and I couldn't figure out how to get it to apply to texlive2007 (too many rejected hunks got me worried). So I just removed the use of libpoppler, instead using the xpdf in-tree sources, and it compiled fine. That's a one-line patch to the source tree (the debian patch series part of it). With those changes, I can use Norbert's latest and greatest context packages. But I know what I'm doing, relatively speaking. Most users on Ubuntu will be stuck until Ubuntu feisty+1 (till October 2007), because texlive2007 is too late to go into feisty (April 2007) and I don't think I should recommend these hacks on the context wiki (in the Ubuntu instructions). So almost all Ubuntu users will have to upgrade context by hand -- not good for them or for getting a wide testing base for context. One of the issues that would hold up texlive2007 in Ubuntu is that Debian didn't transition to the newer libpoppler http://lists.debian.org/debian-tex-maint/2006/10/msg00026.html because of the pain it would cause. So Ubuntu, which picks up Debian unstable and does some stuff to it, is divergent from Debian on this point (Ubuntu has used the newer libpoppler for a while), which was fine for texlive2005 I guess, but not for texlive2007. Which means that Ubuntu would have to do more work to get texlive2007 working -- for which there is no time before the release.
And that there are different versions of (dynamic) libpoppler that are mutually exclusive, even at compile-time?
They are not exclusive at run time, only at compile time. One approach I tried was to install a libpoppler0c2 from an old Ubuntu release, so now I have libpoppler.0 and libpoppler.1 on my system. Then the texlive-2007 binary pkgs could install except that it requires libpng >=1.2.13. Hence the need to recompile from the source pkg in order to compile against my libpng (1.2.8). But the compile fails because of the libpoppler1 headers on my system. And I cannot install an old libpoppler0 set of development headers, because those would overwrite the newer libpoppler1 development headers. I suppose I could install them, compile the src pkg, then reinstall the libpoppler1 development headers. But that's a terrible hack (plus I didn't think of it until now). -Sanjoy `Not all those who wander are lost.' (J.R.R. Tolkien)