* Per Jessen
I think we ought to keep acroread in the distro simply because it's about usability. The current suggestions:
a) download it from adobe yourself b) use something else
are not good enough. If (a) was a real solution, why are we building building a distro at all. (b) is not a solution because there is no 100% replacement for acroread.
By removing acroread, we are sacrificing critical usability because of a rule about unmaintained software. I suggest we reconsider and wait until the alternatives have caught up. Once we have a mature plug-compatible alternative, we can remove acroread.
It's not only unmaintained but unmaintained closed-source software which means at the point in time it becomes unmaintained upstream it turns into a time bomb. The next time security vulnerabilities are discovered in the Acrobat Reader on other platforms Adobe will not evaluate it on Linux, issue a notification and update to fix the issue and nobody else will be able to either. OTOH potential attackers will take notice if we ship an unmaintained and vulnerable version and happily exploit that. And this is harmful and a disservice to our users and the distro, wheN using openSUSE users should be confident that we are making our best effort to keep them safe. And I agree that poppler sucks, rendering of scaled bitmaps is horrible, form and js support aren't up to par, there is no signature verification etc. Unfortunately it seems to be "good enough" for most people, so without competition or a potent sponsor we'll likely be stuck with a mediocre solution. mupdf has some improvements but unfortunately brings its own share of problems (e.g. license, no dynamic linking, lack of real thread-safety). -- Guido Berhoerster -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org