During the Hydro cycle we have rolled out REP 137 for specifying the ROS distribution files and building a reference implementation for it.
After using it for some time we have identified some areas where it needs improvements.
The REP 141 aims to resolve them by changing where information is stored (but not what information is stored):

- Allow to reliably correlate release repositories with their corresponding source / doc repository
   - with REP 137 the repositories referenced in the release.yaml / source.yaml / doc.yaml files could not be correlated reliably
   - with the new format the `rosinstall_generator` could also operate on source repositories
- Allow a status / status_description even for packages which are not released through our buildfarm
- Allow to "blacklist" certain packages for the documentation

Please find the latest draft of the document at:
https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/66

We have already updated the reference implementation on a branch (https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rosdistro/pull/37) and verified that the existing tools still work with it.

If you are interested in this REP please have a close look and vote or comment on the pull request:
https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/66

Thank you,

-- 

Dirk Thomas
ROS Development Team
dthomas@osrfoundation.org