During the Hydro cycle we have been working on REP 137 for specifying the ROS distribution files and building a reference implementation for it.
The main goals of this REP are:

- Clearly separate information required for the different stages of the package life cycles:
   - releasing
   - packaging
   - running tests
   - running prerelease tests
   - generate documentation
- Provide a clean interface for various tools to access these information.
- Update all tools to utilize this information (like rosdistro names, urls, platforms and architectures) in a centralized manor, rather than hard coding in the code base.
- Enable forking of the rosdistro repository in the future in order to run custom buildfarms.

Please find the latest version of the document at:
http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0137.html

We have already circulated this REP (https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/27), and based on the feedback we have updated the REP in the last weeks and the reference implementation 
(https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdistro) is near completion.
Additionally, changes to all the affected tools are pending and should be deployed in the next few days.

If you are interested in this REP please have a close look and vote or comment on the activation pull request:

https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/40

Thank you,

-- 

Dirk Thomas
ROS Development Team
dthomas@osrfoundation.org