Why is pdftk no longer available on Cygwin?

Solution 1:

pdftk relied on the gcj package, which is the GCC compiler for Java. GCJ was officially removed from GCC in September 2016, and therefore subsequently discontinued by the package repositories for the various distros. As a result of this, many repositories have also dropped the (no-longer-buildable) pdftk package itself from their repositories, including Fedora, Ubuntu and Cygwin.

I gave up attempting to build pdftk for my own Cygwin system because of the gcj dependency, and because I couldn't trust a tool from developers who insist on using dependencies that have been deprecated for 4 years now. An email exchange here from 2014 - two years before GCJ was finally dropped by GCC - cites the developer of pdftk as saying:

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.

However, it seems nothing came from this "pre-beta", since the last time the official pdftk had any update at all was in 2013.

I personally had two options available to me: to install the Windows binary of the pdftk, which would result in an installation separate to the rest of my Cygwin environment, or to use a different but similar tool that is available from the Cygwin repository, such as qpdf. Given what I now knew of the last time that pdftk was updated, I opted to use qpdf and so far haven't been disappointed. The one criticism I have of the tool is that its website and documentation looks a lot less prettier (and therefore, less approachable) compared to pdftk's, but the tool itself appears to have all of the same functionality.

qpdf is also available and actively maintained on most other major Unix-like systems, including Ubuntu and Fedora.

EDIT:

Thanks to user1686 for pointing out pdftk-java. pdftk-java is a community project that arose since the dropping of pdftk from the major repositories, with the goal of porting the original pdftk project entirely to Java, and thereby extricating it from any dependency on the gcj C compiler. The project is still fairly new, having had its first release in the middle of 2019, and it wasn't an option for me due to not being available in the Cygwin repository, but it is available on Arch, Debian and Ubuntu.