okular, libgs and crashes on Debian and derivatives

If you are trying postscript rendering on okular, be advised you need to have a recent version, the more recent the best. (around 8.60 or so should good enough)

Unless you use Debian or any of its derivatives that reuse their patches (like Ubuntu) because they are using a patch (06_libpaper_support.dpatch) that makes libgs crash when you reuse the gs instance.

Fortunately for the patch creator there is not any program i know that reused the gs instance, until now. Okular is reusing it and now we crash because of someone patching library code and not being prudent.

So next time you touch library code be prudent! And if you are not the main developer of it be more than prudent!

okular and PS files

I'm having some problems deciding what to do with PS files on okular, seems strange, eh, since PS is so old and unchanging one would think it's a solved problem. At the moment we are using libgs instead of calling the gs binary to render the files but there are some things i am not sure, here is the list of pros and cons of using libgs.

Pro:
* Using a library seems the right thing to my programmer mind
* We don't have to interact with gs using non-portable X properties like kghostview does
* We don't have to write the images to disk and then load them like ligature does

Con:
* Everyone (kghostview/evince/ligature) uses the gs binary
* libgs is not much widespread among distro packages, although that is improving and okular using it would probably "fix it"
* if libgs crashes it takes down the whole process
* libgs API is not what one would like it to be

So anyone out there that has the magic solution?

Of course, testers and constructive comments are more than welcome for the ghostscript okular backend, actually for all okular parts :-)