I want to add support for pdf-tools on "My Fav OS". How do I do that?

I’m working on automating pdf-tools installation as much as possible, in order to improve the installation experience. If you want to add support for a new / currently unsupported Operating System, please modify the server/autobuild script. Say you want to support a new Operating System called MyFavOS. You need to do the following work:

  1. Search for the Figure out where we are section. Here, add a call to os_myfavos right below handle_options at the end of the existing call chain. Here we try and pick up the correct Operating System and install the relevant dependencies.
  2. Add handling for the --os argument in os_argument for myfavos, so that the appropriate function can be called to install pre-requisites. --os is the argument that we pass to the script from the command-line to indicate which OS we are on.
  3. Create a os_myfavos function. This function checks if we are running on MyFavOS. If we are running on MyFavOS, it sets up PKGCMD, PKGARGS and PACKAGES variables so that the appropriate package manager can install the dependencies as part of the rest of the autobuild script.
  4. If you are adding support for your favorite operating system, consider adding automated testing support as well, to help me ensure that epdfinfo continues to compile correctly. See Add a Dockerfile to automate server compilation testing for more details.

The idea here is to make the server/autobuild file the single place from which installation can happen on any Operating System. This makes building pdf-tools dead simple via the Makefile.

This seems like a lot of work, but it is not. If you need a reference, search for os_gentoo or os_debian in the server/autobuild file and see how these are setup and used. The functions are used to install dependencies on Gentoo and Debian respectively, and are simple to copy / change.

When you make your changes, please be sure to test the elisp changes as well as the server code changes as described in the linked articles.

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