Little point to this feature - on most platforms the environment
variable can be overridden if desired to set a new root location.
At the same time, this change removes the ability to resume a partially
executed pipeline by deleting all of the results on failure. If -k is
provided then the temporary files will survive but there's no way to
resume from them. Because resuming doesn't really work away and would
only be useful to users experiencing very specific problems, this is
probably not worth it, so no major loss. The intent of -k is to assist
debugging.
Ghostscript is more reliable than Poppler's pdftoppm renderer. gs is
also a hard dependency, as the only open source tool that can produce
a PDF/A file, while Poppler could be removed. pdftoppm has awkward
syntax with some special handling needed for different versions. I have
found isolated rendering bugs with pdftoppm as well.
With that, I'm removing supporting for multiple rasterizers.
A minor advantage of pdftoppm is that its code produced JPEGs where
possible, but this can be achieved with gs.