Linking TL with poppler?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Hilmar - certainly not a dumb question. I took out those options
because, due to version skew and incompatibilities, it became impossible
(impractical) to support.  It also creates a substantially different
pdftex (et al.) program, which is worrisome to me in principle.

I doubt --with-system-xpdf does anything useful, since I don't think a
standalone libxpdf is distributed on modern systems. (Not sure it ever was.)

Nevertheless, if you or anyone can provide maintainable patches to link
with poppler, I am not opposed to installing them.

Happy hacking,
Karl