[Bug 343] Review request: pdftk - The PDF Tool Kit

[RPM Fusion Bugzilla]

http://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343


Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora at gmail.com> changed:

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--- Comment #1 from Orcan Ogetbil <oget.fedora at gmail.com>  2009-01-26 08:27:12 ---
Perhaps it would be good to give a brief history of this package. All of this
information can be found in Redhat Bugzilla by searching "itext" and "pdftk"

- pdftk is an old project which did not see any updates in the past 2+ years
- pdftk contains parts of an earlier version of itext (java) statically linked
- that earlier version of itext contains parts of an earlier version of
bouncycastle embedded
- some folks find out that this version of itext contains proprietary Sun code
- itext and pdftk get removed from Fedora 7
- itext clears the license issues with Sun and becomes free again
- oget packages the new version of itext for Fedora 10+
- oget (and possibly others) receives/reads requests to package pdftk. 
- But with pdftk's version of itext, this is no easy task.

The way itext and its dependencies (bouncycastle, pdf-renderer, dom4j) are
packaged by their upstreams, one has to do some rigorous work to provide JNI
subpackages for each of them, so that pdftk can link to itext-jni (which will
link to bouncycastle-jni, ...) dynamically.

Additionally, itext saw big modifications since pdftk "borrowed" this old
version. Therefore it is quite possible that even if someone steps up and
builds these JNI subpackages, one will have to patch pdftk to make it
compatible with them.

Well, we waited for 2 months and nobody stepped up (I talked to many people in
fedora-java but I don't think they're much interested). Then I suggested Jochen
to bring this package over to rpmfusion. It can go back to Fedora, but that
requires some serious work as I described above. 

Hence I think this package is suitable for rpmfusion-free for the time being.

Here's the last bits of this story:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471811

I will review the package if other people think it is okay.


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