We will be releasing ROS 1.3 soon. This is an "odd-number" release,
which means that during this release cycle, we will be incorporating
new features, and the stack itself will be unstable.

We are sending advance notice of this release and it is expected to
have several changes that may break existing code. Although we don't
expect normal users to be consuming the 1.3 releases, we wish to give
developers advance notice so that they can prepare as early as
possible for Diamondback.

In particular:

1) rosoct and rosjava will no longer work. These experimental
libraries are using old APIs that can longer be supported. For the
reasons behind this, see REP 100 [1].

2) ROS stack separation: ros, ros_comm, rx, and documentation. We
are separating the ROS stack into four separate stacks. There are many
motivations for this discussed in REP 100 [1]. In particular, we wish
to enable smaller installations of ROS. We also wish to provide the
ROS package and build system as a separate component to other
projects. Stacks that are released against 'unstable' will need to
update their dependencies accordingly.

3) rosrecord is deprecated. It is important that you start migrating
your code off the old deprecated rosrecord package. It was deprecated
in ROS 1.1.15. Since then, the bag format has incorporated new
features that we cannot back-port to the rosrecord package. We expect
to remove the rosrecord package prior to the ROS 1.4 release.

[1] http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0100.html