Following the discussions on ros-developers started by Ingo
Lütkebohle, we've decided to upgrade our current processes for
proposing new features for ROS and its core libraries. ROS was
started less than three years ago, and back in the early days
creating new features usually meant Morgan, Eric, and myself
meeting in a room and deciding to rewrite everything from
scratch. Now, with over 30 institutions contributing public, open
source repositories and over 40 different robots supporting ROS,
we recognize that we must make additional efforts to incorporate
community feedback into the ongoing development of ROS.

We decided to model our future processes off of the "Python
Enhancement Proposal" (PEP) process. The PEP process is fairly
lightweight and open to the entire community.

Our new process will be called the "ROS Enhancement
Proposal" (REP) process. Thanks to the efforts of the Python
community, we were able to quickly boostrap this new process.

You can view an index of REPs here:

http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0000.html

You can also review REP 1*, which defines the REP process:

http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0001.html

We will soon circulate several REPs for public comment to provide
information on current work with ROS. We will also circulate process-
and information-type REPs to help better define the REP process.

We invite members of the community to review REP 1 and put together
their own REPs for consideration. These REPs should be sent to
ros-developers@code.ros.org. Further details are in REP 1.

regards,
Ken

* REP 1 is mostly a search-and-replace of PEP 1, so much credit to
  Barry Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton, David Goodger.