Developers can use their available time more wisely by dealing with high level abstractions rather than low-level types. As well as this, the syntax for creating, loops and lists and other collection objects is more natural than for older languages. In addition to the usual ints and floats the built in string class for example is extremely powerful.
Built in data structures - Python has a great number of built in types.
The good news is that poppler is also a requirement and you already have that installed.
On a workstation with a lot of desktop and 3rd party packages already installed, an attempt to "yum install xpdf" still needs quite a few dependencies: It is going to be a whole lot harder than just unpacking the binaries. If they are required you really need xpdf. Those programs are not provided by poppler. I'm wondering whether this experiment might not lead into problems in context with the exec rights - but, well, did I mention already that I'm not Linux-savvy? This is what I intended as a second resort, because it's also a way that the search engine programmer explains: copying only the two files pdftotext and pdfinfo into cgi-bin - that's why I initally just asked for the two binaries. The approach would be to use rpm2cpio to extract to the user's home directory and set things up so the required binaries are on the path and libraries can be found using LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If that doesn't work, then one might be able to kludge something by installing binaries and libraries under the user directory, but that would be far from simple or ideal. (From all this above you can easily conclude that I'm not at all Linux-savvy.) Is the poppler directory tree different? I guess I might find this information myself in the rpm (or not?), but the EPEL rpm link you gave me seems to point to some sort of meta rpm since it's only 12 kB big. However, it didn't find pdftotext nor pdfinfo there. Ok, they say they installed poppler - not telling me where, so as the (defunct) xpdf installation was in /usr/bin/xpdf/, I entered /usr/bin/poppler/ into the config file of the search engine.
To get current bug fixes and security patches it is highly recommended to update following section 4 of the CentOS 5.4 Release Notes to avoid problems with glibc. Is your hosting provider really keeping you at 5.2? It is practically stone-age by now, as the current release is 5.4 and upstream should release 5.5 soon. You can find a compatible version of xpdf in the EPEL repo. All that is needed is yum install poppler kdegraphics evince
No need to compile anything as poppler is part of the core distro.
How to provide information about your system The following reading is recommended for new users: