PDFtk dependency issues with CentOS-7/RHEL-7 | Build Fails | Dependencies libgc Unavailable

[riker1]

building PDFtk on RHEL 7 currently isn't possible due to upstrean (Fedora) dropping support for libgcj

[ericstyrer2@ceti-alpha-five ~]$#  yum localinstall pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64.rpm
Error: Package: pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64 (/pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64)
    Requires: libgcj.so.10()(64bit)
Error: Package: pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64 (/pdftk-2.02-1.el6.x86_64)
 **Requires: libgcj**
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

I'm emailed the autors of PDFtk and they said they're working on it..

Date: August 15, 2014 at 11:54:50 AM EDT
From: Sid Steward sid.steward@pdflabs.com
To: Eric Tyrer etyrer@york.cuny.edu
Subject: Re: PDF Labs

Yes, I've heard that they're dropping support for libgcj. We have been working on a new pdftk that doesn't depend on libgcj, but it is currently pre-beta.

I wrote that in August of 2014 and now its near 2015.

There hasn't been any development on libgcj since 2009, reimplementing that libary most likely would be a heavy lift. I'm guessing that Oracle wouldn't be too friendly either since they hold all the Java patents.

Also the licensing for PDFtk's other component, iText, has changed from GPL 2 to GPL 3. This might also affect redistribution?

More reading on PDFtk's death (Fedora Discussion List)

Discussion on CentOS forum on gcc-java and libgcj-devel missing (needed to compile pdftk))

There’s someone who mentions possibly an alternative PDF toolkit at the bottom of the thread..

What does the community think?

[knowtheory]

It's probably time to actually put pdftailor out there.

We've been using it under the hood in production for a year now, and while it doesn't replace all of pdftk, it does enough for docsplit to get its job done.

You can skip the pdftk installation process, gem install pdftailor instead and docsplit will work fine.

[knowtheory]

Oh another note though, it does use iText under the hood, so if you're worried about iText's AGPL license, pdftailor's not going to help you much there.

[riker1]

thanks for the info. i'm not worried about the AGPL license per se.. it seemed that in the threads that may be a redistribution issue? i'm not sure how that works -- I'm a sysadmin not a lawyer (lol).

[jscrobinson]

After some searching we've found http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/ which seems to be a good replacement for pdftk (at least for encryption).

[jpujari]

We switched to paid php packages, since it doesn't have OS dependency
http://www.setasign.com/products/

[vielhuber]

I am a pdftk power user and the dependency problems on GCJ seems to be a big problem for us.
We are soon updating our servers to Fedora 22 and Cent OS 7.

Can somebody please give us some information about the current plans for the future of pdftk?
Is it in active development or not? What’s the progress on moving away from GCJ?

If not, are there any alternatives for filling out pdf forms from the command line?
Thanks in advance.

[jpujari]

We had to switch to a paid product, but the product is good and reliable

https://www.setasign.com/products/setapdf-formfiller/details/
On Oct 19, 2015 5:39 PM, "David Vielhuber" notifications@github.com wrote:

I am a pdftk power user and the dependency problems on GCJ seems to be a
big problem for us.
We are soon updating our servers to Fedora 22 and Cent OS 7.

Can somebody please give us some information about the current plans for
the future of pdftk?
Is it in active development or not? What’s the progress on moving away
from GCJ?

If not, are there any alternatives for filling out pdf forms from the
command line?
Thanks in advance.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#123 (comment)
.

[vielhuber]

Thanks for your answer.

• Does SetaPDF have any critical dependencies? Which libraries do they use?
• I cannot imagine that there is no other open source tool like pdftk to fill out pdf forms from the command line. But it seems that this is the case. Have I overlooked something?

[jpujari]

I did some research on other open source alternatives could not find any at
the time which is 8 months back. Not sure if you will have better luck. As
for the dependencies, SetaPDF have listed the system requirements on the
following page

https://www.setasign.com/support/faq/setapdf/system-requirements/#p-88
https://www.setasign.com/support/faq/setapdf/system-requirements/#p-88

Thanks and Regards,
Jeetendra Pujari

On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 3:29 AM, David Vielhuber notifications@github.com
wrote:

Thanks for your answer.

Does SetaPDF have any critical dependencies? Which libraries do they
use?

I cannot imagine that there is no other open source tool like pdftk to
fill out pdf forms from the command line. But it seems that this is the
case. Have I overlooked something?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#123 (comment)
.

[knowtheory]

just a heads up, we're slowly replacing pdftk's feature set w/ PDFium which we've wrapped up into PDFShaver.

At the moment tho we're just using PDFium + FreeImage to generate snapshots of pages.

[jpmckinney]

@knowtheory Would you recommend using PDFShaver over GraphicsMagick for generating the images that Tesseract performs OCR on?

[robert-scheck]

Given this issue is still open, I would like to point out that there is meanwhile a Yum repository at https://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/robert/pdftk/ serving a pdftk RPM package for RHEL/CentOS 7 – because I just needed PDFtk myself. However, for the long term a switch (as already mentioned before) might be clever through (rather depending on retired software projects).

[fulldecent]

Hello all. pdftk / CentOS 7 compatibility is a big problem for me. Also the copr solution is not supported by Rackspace, my sysadmin. pdftk is clearly the best solution but it is not actively maintained and it has legacy which has gone stale. Of course the solution is simple -- fork it!

My company will contribute a bounty of $1,000 to "fix" this issue, which will of course require a LOT of effort and rewriting. We may increase that further, and I invite others to add to that bounty if you can. I will use Bountysource. I will solicit to others that use pdftk (see https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=pdftk). I might even get a GitHub ban / warning for this. Oh well, I break rules sometimes.

Before we can offer a bounty, I need to be sure somebody won't collect the bounty and mess everything up. Would somebody here be willing to help with adding a couple VERY simple test cases to the fork and Travis CI integration?

The fork is at https://github.com/fulldecent/pdftk and I have added this information to the README. I would appreciate your thoughts to help make this a success!

[coltcox]

I was able to get pdftk working on CentOS 7 by using these two repos.

• https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/robert/gcj/
• https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/robert/pdftk/

These commands will get you fully up and running.

wget https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/robert/gcj/repo/epel-7/robert-gcj-epel-7.repo -P /etc/yum.repos.d

https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/robert/pdftk/repo/epel-7/robert-pdftk-epel-7.repo -P /etc/yum.repos.d

yum install pdftk

[treeandbrick]

For extracting/splitting pages, ghostscript works great.

Also good: poppler. It provides pdfseparate and pdfunite.