Dear MoveIt! and ROS users,
I wanted to give you information about how MoveIt!
will be dealing with the new ROS distro Indigo.
Based on feedback from the MoveIt! survey conducted
last year and prior experience from the PR2, we know
that most robots seem to lag the most recent ROS
release by a significant time period (a year or more
sometimes). We would like to encourage MoveIt!
adoption on more and more robots and also give
people time to catch up but still be able to use the
newest features in MoveIt! with their robot. We have
used this information to formulate our strategy
around ROS Indigo (at least in the near-term).
We will
not branch and develop separately for
Indigo. The version of MoveIt! in Indigo will be a
near copy of that in Hydro. New features, bug-fixes,
etc. will continue to go into Hydro - there are almost
always ways to do this without having to break API and
we will try to maintain API stability. Everything new
that is being released into Hydro will also be ported
into Indigo releases. This will allow both users
working with the latest distributions and users
working with older distributions to keep using
MoveIt!.
Let me know if there are any questions/comments about
this.