[Libre-soc-dev] Tool Dependencies

[Richard Wilbur]

Can one of our bespoke tools depend on newer releases of packages than released with Debian 10?

I know we have established Debian 10 as our reference development system for the libre-soc project.  I was wondering whether I can use a newer version of pdftools (pdftotext, specifically) than is available under Debian 10 and make my pdf POWER instruction parser depend on it?

It turns out that on 1 Mar 2021 poppler v21.03.0 was released with the “-cropbox” option for pdftotext which works for the “-bbox” and “-bbox-line” modes.  I was looking at implementing it myself, but it seems like a waste of effort and the antithesis of the libre software ethos to do that when it has already been released under a libre license.

This option greatly simplifies automating the detection of superscripts and subscripts, which in the normal output of pdftotext are indistinguishable from baseline text.

I plan to install Debian 10 on a machine and then I can sort out any additional dependencies imposed by poppler v21.03.0.