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)

For those who fear a fork

I just wanted to inform you that a few moments after the DRM code was added to KPDF we added a configure switch so if you do

./configure --enable-kpdf-drm=no

you still get the old behaviour. IMHO that rules out any possibility of a fork.

Mantainership is a heavy rock

Since i took kpdf mantainership I've been quite proud of the changes Enrico, Tobias and me have made to it. But all things have its bad faces, and kpdf development have had 2 of them.

First of them happened when i introduced the possibility of running external programs on a user click on a link if the pdf specified this, that was put down by kde-cvs list readers as they said it was a security problem even if we added a dialog asking the user if he wanted to execute the command or not. IMHO that can be an interesting feature in some cases like when doing a presentation, but i can understand the security implications

The second has happened today when Enrico and me have added the DRM handling to PDF, that means, if the pdf says you can not print it, we don't let you do it, and some similar things. That has caused some controversy on #kde-devel as people said that this removes freedom from the user side and that there is no need for us to implement it. IMHO there is a need for this, i mean we don't go on opening password protected files without asking for a password, if the author put a password on it it was because he had good reasons, so if the author decided he did not like his pdf to be printed we do the same as with the password protected the file. Maybe you want to print the file, but should not blame kpdf for not being able to print it, blame the author for being an asshole.

Well i suppose being the mantainer of a program means you have to be prepared for such discussions.

Firefox spreads ... non free pdf viewers

If you have downloaded http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf you may have surely noticed that no free pdf viewer can display it, not xpdf(so no kpdf nor gpdf), not gv(so no kghostview nor ggv)

Reading the comments on the news item seems nodoby cares for it ... But i do, why is one of the jewels of the Free Software promoting non Free Software pdf viewers, i'm sure it could have been generated in a way that it looked the same and worked on free viewers.

Update: It seems it works with gs 8.15, the problem is that CUPS only comes with 7.07, any idea if anyone is working on CUPS? Will they ever update their gs version?

When bugs cannot be reproduced...

I hate it, you get a bugzilla mail saying someone have found a crash on the program you mantain, you go to bugzilla and see they have a way of reproduce the crash, open a document and kaboom, kpdf is dead. Then you download the documents, open them and ..... nothings happens :-S

What does that mean? I don't know, but that has already happened twice that week with bug 93352 and bug 93517.

Free Software community rules

This week i received another map for KGeography, that means 5 of the 9 available maps have been made by contributors different than me, which would be rather strange since the program is quite simple and not even finished, but it is not strange, why? Because Free Software community is big and active, so i get maps and translations to more than 10 different languages for my app.

To everyone that makes this possible.

THANKS

Introduction

Ei! My first blog ever in English and about KDE :=)

I will introduce me, my name is Albert Astals Cid, i suppose most of you don't know, but Spanish people have two surnames so Astals is my first surname and Cid my second one. My KDE login name is aacid and i usually hang on #kde-devel as TSDgeos.

My KDE related work has two sides, the first one is as a member of the Catalan (ca) translation team and the second one is as developer. As developer i am currently mantaining kpdf with help from Enrico Ros, also have some programs on kdenonbeta like kgeography, kfly and ktetrinet. Finally as annma usually says in her blog i like to help where i can.

As a news flash i'll say that the kpdf icon contest already has a winner and we're only waiting for the right time to announce it.