Hello all,

I would like to present a review of the strategy taken to create ROS2.

Recently OSRF announced the release of an 'alpha1' ROS2 milestone [1].
The list of missing features is still quite long. That also means some
opportunity to still influence decisions.

OSRF has been promoting ROS2 at ROSCon2014 [2], and provides
documentation [3]. As a reminder, major goals include improving real
time robotics, embedded robotics, Windows-compatibility, messaging
over unreliable networks and multi-robot scenarios.

All changes come at a cost, there are tradeoffs to be made. I have
initiated several discussions in the NG mailing list [4] to preview
the impact of ROS2.

The short version is that currently ROS2 has completely separate
sources and requires different core tools (e.g. a buildsystem that is
not compatible with catkin), and many APIs have breaking changes. The
migration to ROS2 will take similar effort as migrating all ROS
packages to a different middleware. A long transition period is
likely. Supporting packages in parallel for both ROS1 and ROS2 will be
very hard. Because of the lack of backwards compatibility, the
transition to ROS2 will probably be a large disruption to everyone
using ROS (https://i.imgflip.com/rl3g1.jpg).

The long version is here:
http://wiki.ros.org/sig/NextGenerationROS/StrategyReview

I announced that wiki review page one week ago on the NG mailing list
and tried to include feedback. Thanks to all who gave feedback.

Please use the NG mailing list for feedback about ROS2:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ros-sig-ng-ros

regards,
  Thibault



[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ros-sig-ng-ros/B4BAQY5c3xs
[2] http://www.osrfoundation.org/wordpress2/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ROSCON-2014-Why-you-want-to-use-ROS-2.pdf
[3] http://design.ros2.org/
[4] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ros-sig-ng-ros
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