New issue policy (July 2025)

[EliotJones]

One of the largest challenges to maintainer motivation and project health for open source projects is a constantly growing issue backlog.

While issues provide valuable insights into real-world usage, many are near-impossible to act on. This is especially the case for those without reproducible examples or affected documents (e.g. where the document contains PII).

In PdfPig's case, contributors maintain this project voluntarily, with no financial compensation. As a result, it's not feasible to treat every issue as requiring a resolution.

To keep the project sustainable and contributors engaged, we're adopting a stricter issue management policy. This policy draws inspiration from both the Babylonian Debt Jubilee and Marie Kondo.

What this means for you:

• Issue clean-up: All unclosed issues older than the start of 2025 will be closed unless they indicate a clear bug we can solve with a sample document that we intend to resolve. Similar debt jubilees will reoccur periodically.
• No follow-up needed: We won't wait for confirmation that a fix worked. If the problem remains after the suggested fix feel free to open a new issue.
• Pending feedback: If your issue is tagged as no-document or pending-feedback it will be closed after 1-2 weeks (or whenever we get round to it) in the absence of any further discussion.
• Issue triage is subjective: Closing issues may sometimes feel arbitrary but maintainer sanity is important to project health. If your issue doesn't "spark joy" it will probably be closed rather than languishing unanswered.
• Feature requests: Issues related to feature requests we intend to address will be consolidated into a single reference issue. This will be any issue from the set of duplicates at random.

What this doesn't mean

• You're not allowed to open issues: You absolutely are. Closing an issue doesn't delete it, it remains searchable and useful for reference.
• Bugs won’t be fixed: They will, however we will prioritize actionable, reproducible bugs that align with the library's focus. Extremely complex or niche issues may be closed unresolved.
• You’re on your own: The source is available, documented, and mostly™️ understandable. If something’s broken and important to you, diving in is encouraged.

Thanks to everyone who’s filed issues, contributed code, or just used PdfPig. This policy helps us keep things manageable while still improving the library for the community and ensuring we can continue to maintain it in the longer term.

[EliotJones]

@BobLd I'm planning to pin this but wanted to get your feedback first, any changes you'd like to see?

[BobLd]

@EliotJones all good from my end! Thanks a lot for that

[davebrokit]

Hi @EliotJones , I respect your decision. #855 has a PR (#864) for it but got stuck in discussion over some controversial changes. I can re-raise that PR without the controversial changes if that helps. See final comment on the PR for the contensious issues.

[EliotJones]

@davebrokit that's fine, we can keep the discussion going in that PR. I've responded to you there. I know the best practice in most projects is to raise an issue in partnership with the PR so thank you for doing that. However in line with the goal of squashing issue count we'll keep discussion in the PR and not have the related issue.