Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 10, 2020 11:04 UTC (Tue) by anton (subscriber, #25547)
In reply to: Packaging Kubernetes for Debian by rgmoore
Parent article: Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

For some packages, the contribution by Debian is negative. E.g., for many years now, I have needed to build xpdf from source on every Debian/Ubuntu system because the Debian-crippled version only prints on letter paper (which we don't have around here); all configuration options for A4 paper (both the upstream xpdf ones as well as the Debian ones) are ignored.

Maybe the overall contribution by Debian is positive, but it seems to me that some Debian people are too convinced of their importance, and would do better by just packaging the upstream with as few changes as possible.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 12, 2020 0:18 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (2 responses)

That sounds like it may be a bug indeed; have you reported it?

On the other hand, the upstream version of xpdf inexplicably refuses to let you copy text from certain PDFs, and upstream refuses to fix this. The debian version has fixed that bug.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 12, 2020 9:14 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I believe the pdf spec allows you to put flags in saying "you can do this, you can't do that".

I guess Debian honour those flags to avoid potential legal liability. Sounds pretty typical for them.

Cheers,
Wol

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Nov 12, 2020 9:55 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

xpdf does not allow to copy text from PDFs that have been marked accordingly, and that was documented (I don't find that documentation at the moment, though). So it's a misfeature, not a bug; however, the documentation explained that it is easy to change xpdf to ignore the flag, so if that's what Debian's maintainers want to do, I don't think they need to ignore all sources of the desired paper size to do it.

Packaging Kubernetes for Debian

Posted Jan 10, 2021 1:32 UTC (Sun) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]

Is this https://bugs.debian.org/120645 opened 2001-11-22 and closed 2001-11-25?
Maybe you should reopen it, if setting of /etc/papersize to "a4" does not work on your system.
I just tried to print an A4 PDF into a PS file using xpdf 3.04-14 on Debian testing and the result is A4.
Works for me, but that's 19 years later ;-)