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uhm, this will be a long post, but i'll try to keep it short :)
a few words about fop. we write our documentation in asciidoc. asciidoc is plain text with a very simple markup, asciidoc can convert this to docbook. then docbook-xsl can convert this to .fo, finally fop can convert .fo to .pdf.
my problem with fop is that it's written in java and we just used the upstream binary. this is primarily a security problem.
so, about one and a half months ago got the crazy idea to compile fop from source. of course the correct way to do this is to package first the depends. this is really a avalanche, becase we didn't have too much generic java libs packaged, so i had to package many. namely:
jflex, piccolo, gnu.regexp, jarjar, jmock, qdox, easymock, hamcrest, iso-relax, relaxngdatatype, xsdlib, msv, xpp3, xpp2, gnu-crypto, apache-log4j, xmldb-api, ws-jaxme, dom4j, jdom, icu4j, jaxp, jaxp, xom, jaxen, rhino, batik, servletapi, jaf, gnuinetlib, gnumail, avalon-logkit, avalon-framework, commons-logging, commons-io and xmlgraphics-commons.
hm. that's 36. horrible ;)
the nice thing is that all these (except xmlgraphics-commons because classpath still lacks jpeg support) are compiled with the ecj/gcj toolchain, without any sun blob.
the other benefits are:
- a native fop binary:
$ file /usr/bin/fop /usr/bin/fop: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.0, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
- now we got rid of fop-devel, since this version can both convert ttf fonts to xml ones (needed if you want to embed custom fonts into pdf) and convert fo documents to pdf ones.
yay!