Summary: we're pushing back the freeze schedule of Fuerte by 4 weeks. Hi all, The good news is that the major core upgrades for ROS Fuerte have landed, we are now building most of the full distribution on top of these core upgrades [1], and can even try out them out in debian (sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-). The bad news is that we're a bit behind schedule: we're two weeks behind the planned initial freeze date, and there are some known issues with important core tools/libraries (e.g. roslaunch, roslisp, and rosdep). [1]: http://www.ros.org/debbuild/fuerte.html To be fair to everyone who has to integrate on top of these changes, we're pushing out the other freeze dates by four weeks. We're being conservative here: most of you should already be able to integrate your stacks with confidence. What are the required migrations? --------------------------------- We've already put together a migration guide to help you integrate on top of the new system [2]. The migrations are fairly trivial and backwards compatible with Electric. The migration guide also has instructions for building your code against the Fuerte changes. [2]: http://ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Migration What are the core upgrades? --------------------------- ROS messages are now standalone: they can be used outside of the rosbuild system and they have fairly minimal dependencies (Boost Date_Time and small serialization libraries). If you have your own CMake project, you can easily pull in ROS messages and use them in your code. This is an important change to support use of messages in other standalone libraries, like PCL, Ecto, and some forthcoming efforts. To support this, the other major upgrade is replacing the use of the rosbuild system in the low-level stacks with catkin (online docs coming soon). The gist of catkin is nearly everything is done with cmake now -- no rosmake, no Makefiles wrapping cmake, etc... Code built with catkin installs into FHS [3] layouts and uses the normal CMake find infrastructure. This means that anything built with catkin can be easily used from other CMake projects. As a corollary, we are now building catkin-based stacks with git-buildpackage, so our debian-building toolchain is much more 'normal'. However, even with all of these changes, we've worked hard to make sure that the underlying system is backwards compatible with the old rosbuild system. In otherwords, if you use rosmake to build your project, you can still use rosmake to build your project, and you shouldn't really notice the difference. We will migrate more and more ROS stacks over time to use the new build system as it creates higher-quality releases, but we hope to keep these changes seamless to you as a user. [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard Releasing into Fuerte, Unstable vs. Fuerte ------------------------------------------ We've been bringing up the new system as 'fuerte'. We've left 'unstable' in place with the legacy system so that we can cross-verify the two as well as enable stack maintainers to continue to release new updates. We are now opening up 'fuerte' for your releases. You will need a new release script as the old create.py script depends on libraries that have been moved. Instructions are here: http://ros.org/wiki/fuerte/release We encourage you to release into 'fuerte' instead of 'unstable'. Now that the new system has landed, our integration efforts are focused on the combined system.