Arch Linux User Repository

I've created the simplified pdfsam-bin package for those who want to avoid the whole jdk/jre dependency hell.

What palexdev is suggesting is of course absolutely doable and might actually be easier for some users. On the other hand the strategy of bundling a complete JRE seems to be discouraged by the Java package guidelines at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Java_package_guidelines. At least that's how I read them. Check this

"As is standard with Arch Linux packages, if the above standards cannot be adhered to without a serious amount of work, the package should be installed in its preferred manner, with the resulting directory located in /opt. This is useful for programs that bundle JREs or include customized versions of dependencies, or do other strange or painful tasks."

The dependency list is very short:

depends=('hicolor-icon-theme' 'java-runtime=25' 'sh' 'archlinux-java-run' 'java-openjfx=25')

It's just that there are so many versions of some dependencies, but only one of them has to be chosen.

@palexdev:

1) Well, you could of course offer a tarball which doesn't include Java and thus isn't huge. ;)

2) I understand the issues, but package management is actually handling everything quite well, if the package is well written and specifies all the necessary dependencies (possibly including the required versions). Which I think is the case for the given pdfsam package after some transition problems have been solved.

Download PDFsam Basic v6.0.1 Portable archive (.tar.gz ) no dependency

The dependency list and the resulting installation are huge. There are other software that can do exactly the same thing in the terminal; the only thing that is original about it is that it can merge PDF and keep their respective bookmarks and even create more: one per document.

@PhotonX I do understand the philosophy and I think it's a nice thing.
However in this case, bringing in your own Java dependencies leads to a bunch of pain points:
1) Waste of space. As said previously, since the software already comes prepackaged with its own Java runtime, you are downloading extra stuff for nothing, especially JavaFX which is big and niche
2) You risk running into startup(most frequent) or even runtime issues. We package our app this way to avoid user error and the burden to setup everything correctly. Think of it like an AppImage, Flatpak or even a .exe, double click and run philosophy, easy and immediate.

In any case I'm not the maintainer and I'm not gonna tell you how to do things, it was just a consideration :)

I think, Linux' philosophy is to make packages modular, that is, each app relies on libraries provided by other packages rather than shipping its own libraries (as is often done in the Windows world). I guess, in Windows software developers are just forced to ship the libraries with their software because there is no package management which could take care of installing them. If each app ships all the necessary libraries, there are multiple copies of them taking up hard disk space, that's basically what Flatpaks do. But maybe in this case using the system wide instance of java libraries induces problems which wouldn't appear if using the bundled instance. On the other hand, the package worked perfectly fine with versions <6.0, so maybe the issues popping up now are just temporary and related to the 6.x transition to a new java version, so things will calm down again soon.

PDFSam developer here
This package seems overengineered to me. To run PDFSam Basic you don't need any additional dependency. The Java runtime is already included in the package and includes JavaFX of course, you just need to run the .sh file in the bin directory.

pdfsam 6.0.0-3 fails: FindException: Module javafx.graphics not found - the launcher's archlinux-java-run --java-home short-circuits before the JavaFX module-path injection, so java runs with only --module-path "/usr/share/java/pdfsam".

Fix: drop --java-home so archlinux-java-run builds the full command (its extend_java_args merges JFX into the existing -p):

#!/bin/sh
exec archlinux-java-run --feature 'javafx' --min 25 --max 25 -- \
    --enable-native-access=javafx.graphics --enable-preview \
    --module-path "/usr/share/java/pdfsam" \
    --module org.pdfsam.basic/org.pdfsam.basic.App -Xmx512M \
    -splash:/usr/share/pdfsam/splash.png -Dapp.name=pdfsam-basic \
    -Dapp.pid="$$" -Dprism.lcdtext=false "$@"

Update error 6.0.0.1 -> 6.0.0.3 missing „java-openjfx=25”