To be fair, Fuerte was late as well, and the reasons that drove Fuerte to
be late also fed into a longer cycle for Groovy.  The continued growth of
ROS creates scaling issues-- it takes a significant effort to keep the
thousands of package in ROS even compiling together, and the changes in
Fuerte/Groovy were meant to make this easier in the future.  It would be
nice to appreciative of these efforts.

  - Ken


On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 2:24 AM, Thibault Kruse <kruset@in.tum.de> wrote:

> On 18.02.2013 19:10, Yamokoski, JD (JSC-ER)[OCEANEERING SPACE SYSTEMS]
> wrote:
>
>> Software as complex and as large as ROS will have some bumps and bruises
>> at a major release - but from the outside looking in, it appears as though
>> too much was changed in this release (as evidenced by the above plus the
>> longer than normal release cycle).
>>
> After Tully's response I'll add some comment to this now. Please consider
> also the following facts. Up to fuerte, ROS releases were managed by Ken
> Conley, who left for Google as announced in April 2012. So release
> management switched hands (I am not implying Tully is less capable, but I
> do know he has had several other dominant assignments at Willow Garage).
>
> Also, in 2012 employees also left Willow Garage for spin-offs like
> Industrial Perception, OpenPerception OSRF and HiDof, as well as other jobs.
>
> So among the people that left ROS world in 2012 are: Ken Conley, Troy
> Straszheim, Radu B. Rusu, Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Wim Meeussen, E. Gil
> Jones, Stu Glaser, Bhaskara Marthi (in random order). I would also count
> Brian Gerkey as being absent from the ROS world 2012 as far as ROS
> engineering goes, because building up OSRF itself seems to have been a lot
> of work with also a strong focus on Gazebo. If you don't know those names,
> you'll find most of them in this list of all time ROS contributors:
> http://www.ohloh.net/p/ros-**pkg/contributors?query=&sort=**commits<http://www.ohloh.net/p/ros-pkg/contributors?query=&sort=commits>(though that list does not span all of ROS, and needs updating for the
> switch to github). This does not count non-Willow Garage staff that moved
> away from the ROS world, such as PhD students being now finished and taking
> up jobs outside the ROS world.
>
> Also note many of the poeple I listed left ROS world without doing any of:
> - Announcing their departure to the ROS community
> - Nominating successors as maintainers for the packages they maintained,
> or declaring the packages unmaintained
> - Handing over issues assigned to them in issue trackers
>
> Those ROS contributors also held a lot of knowledge about their packages
> and the ROS toolchain that had in the past been useful to prepare and
> validate previous releases, this knowledge was not available for the Groovy
> release. I can only guess that hiring and training new talents with such
> high fluctuation of key members of the ROS team cannot be expected to go
> smoothly.
>
> So the problems you noted as well as the release date slippage are not
> (only) due to too many changes in the Groovy release.
>
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