Introduce a release schedule, and shorten the time between releases

Currently we don’t have a set release schedule, which sometimes result in quite long times between releases (and also leads to issues along the lines of “When is the next stable release?”).

To address this, I’m thus proposing that we first of all introduce a release schedule and secondly that we also shorten the time between releases. In particular, I’d suggest that we basically try to follow the Firefox release schedule (perhaps with a small offset, e.g. creating a new release the weekend that follows each Firefox release); see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

The advantages of these changes include:

• A much more predictable release schedule, reducing user confusion about when future releases will happen.
• Shorter release cycles, meaning that e.g. bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features will reach users much sooner (since most users seem unwilling to utilize the pre-releases, despite those being generally very stable).
• A shorter release cycle would also mean that any regression fixes would reach stable releases much faster.
• Shorter release cycles would mean that there’s a lot fewer changes in each release, especially e.g. api-minor ones, which should hopefully make updating easier for users.
• Shorter release cycles would also reduce the total amount of time that we need to keep deprecated-functionality around, improving readability/maintainability of e.g. the API-code.

The disadvantages of these changes include:

• The PDF.js release process includes a couple of manual steps, and more frequent releases would thus be taking more time overall for the contributor creating the release (which for the last few years has been handled excellently by Tim).
• Shorter release cycles could possibly make it more difficult for users to keep up with updates.

/cc @timvandermeij Any ideas/opinions about these suggestions?

[brendandahl]

Should be good to go. Let me know if there’s anything else.

[brendandahl]

No objections here. Let’s go for it.