Andrew Ayer

I discovered today that Xpdf deterministically segfaults when you try to print any PDF under i386 Wheezy. It doesn't segfault on amd64 Wheezy which is why I had not previously noticed this. Someone reported this bug over two years ago, which you'd think would have given ample time for this to be fixed for Wheezy. This bug led me to a related bug which paints quite a sad picture. To summarize:

• Xpdf uses its own PDF rendering engine. Some other developers thought it would be nice to be able to use this engine in other applications, so they ripped out Xpdf's guts and put them in a library called Poppler. Unfortunately, Xpdf continued to use its own rendering engine instead of linking with Poppler, so now there are two diverging codebases that do basically the same thing.
• Apparently this code is bad and has a history of security vulnerabilities. The Debian maintainers quite reasonably don't want to support both codebases, so they have attempted to patch Xpdf to use Poppler instead of its own internal engine.
• Unfortunately, this is hard and they haven't done a perfect job at it, which has led to a situation where Xpdf and Poppler each define their own, incompatible, versions of the same struct... with which they then attempt to interoperate.
• As a consequence, Xpdf accesses uninitialized memory, or accesses initialized memory incorrectly, so it's a miracle any time you manage to use Xpdf without it crashing.

The Debian maintainers have three options:

1. Stop trying to patch Xpdf to use Poppler.
2. Fix their patch of Xpdf so it actually works.
3. Do nothing.

There is a patch for option 2, but it has been rejected for being too long and complicated. Indeed it is long and complicated, and will make it more difficult to package new upstream versions of Xpdf. But that's the price that will have to be paid as Xpdf and Poppler continue to diverge, if the maintainers insist that Xpdf use Poppler. Unfortunately they seem unwilling to pay this price, nor are they willing to go with option 1. Instead they have taken the easy way out, option 3, even though this results in a totally broken, and possibly insecure, package that is only going to get more broken.

Clearly I can't be using this quagmire of a PDF viewer, so I have uninstalled it after being a user for more than 10 years. Sadly, the alternatives are not great. Most of them take the position that UIs are for chumps, preferring instead to use keyboard shortcuts that I will never remember because I don't view PDFs often enough. Debian helpfully provides a version of Evince that isn't linked with GNOME and it works decently. Unfortunately, after quitting it, I noticed a new process in my process list called "evinced." As in "evince daemon." As in, a PDF viewer launched its own daemon. As in, a PDF viewer launched its own daemon. I don't even...

epdfview is like Evince but less cool because it doesn't have its own daemon has buggy text selection. qpdfview is rather nice but copies selected text in such a way that it can't be pasted by middle-clicking (it copies into XA_CLIPBOARD instead of XA_PRIMARY).

I decided to go with Evince and pretend I never saw evinced.

Update (2014-01-20): The Xpdf bug has allegedly been fixed, by defining a new version of the incompatible struct. This is option 2, which means we can expect Xpdf to break again as Poppler and Xpdf continue to diverge. It appears to be a different patch from the one that was rejected earlier, though I can't find any of the discussion which led to this fix being adopted. I will update this blog post if I learn more information.