An announcement on pace of development of pdf-tools

[vedang]

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✏️ Aim of this discussion : Setting expectations for the pace of development of pdf-tools

I wish Github provided a way to set maintenance expectations on a project by project basis, but it does not (as far as I know) so here we are.

Time set aside for breaking / critical bugs

If there is a bug where pdf-tools breaks completely / fails to install on Ubuntu / breaks due to changes in Emacs or poppler, I will look at the problem immediately and will provide regular updates in an issue that I set up a track this change.

Time set aside for PRs

The next highest priority is to PRs. I will try and provide feedback on PRs at least once a month, and where possible I will set expectations on when the PR can be expected to be merged in.

Time set aside for Issues

Finally issues: I will try and cover new issues on days I keep aside for PRs if time permits. The pdf-tools community is super helpful, so issues often have a lot of discussion / get resolved without my intervention.

💪 Upcoming Milestones : Releases 1.0.0 and 1.1.0

I have some free time coming up around mid-July, and I plan to work on pdf-tools then. Issues / PRs planned for the above milestones have already been tagged. The primary goals of the two miilestones are as follows:

1. 1.0.0 : In this release, I will remove support for older versions of Emacs and stick with the last three Emacs major versions (26, 27, 28). This release will mostly be code cleanup and simplifying installation processes / documentation.
2. 1.1.0 : In this release, I will merge in most the new features that have been pending in current PRs. There are interesting changes pending around themes, annotations and navigation.

🙏 Request for patience

Finally, I just want to clarify that I totally understand the frustration people feel when their particular itch isn't scratched fast enough. However, I hope you, dear reader, will understand and appreciate that I have other demands on my time. There are many interesting changes that I think we can make to pdf-tools and I'm hoping that I can at least make the entire code-base approachable and document everything so that other contributors can get started quickly. The pdf-tools wiki is at https://pdftools.wiki/ and it's simply a static site rendered from the README.org file.

I hope all of you continue to use and enjoy pdf-tools.