Hi Tully, Supporting LTS + 1 and not supporting LTS + 3 might be a bit confusing in the long run. I think it would be easier to convey that only the Spring Ubuntu releases are supported (i.e. LTS, LTS + 2). I believe this might be a good compromise between LTS users and non LTS users. +1 for Hydro release in July. Thanks! Piyush On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 6:46 PM, Tully Foote wrote: > * > > Hi Everyone, > > As a follow up to the survey we circulated last month I'd like to start a > discussion of what the best timeline for ROS releases would be. > > As a reminder of the survey results see: > https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzNmzxy4pVGMZHd2b1BSWVlHVHM/edit > > We've had many discussions here at OSRF about these results and have come > up with a few candidates which seem reasonable. I'll outline the logic > behind how we got to them and would like to hear what you think. > > Starting out based on the survey. We had a majority of respondants > prefering a 12 month release cycle and a plurality of respondants > preferring a 24 month support period. These two number nicely allign with > our current practice of having two supported ROS distributions at a time > with one ROS distribution in development, however just with a longer > release cycle. This amount of parallel development is about all that we > think we can support as a community. So based on this I think there's a > relatively clear mandate to change the ROS release cycle to every 12 months > with 24 months of support, allowing 12 months of overlap between releases > for transition. > > We've put together a nice graphic see ros.svg > > Unfortunately the problem is not quite as simple as the above graphic > shows as we need to build on top of other platforms. Ubuntu has recently > updated their planned release cycle to support LTS for 5 years, but non-LTS > releases for only 9 months while maintaining their 6 month release cycle. > See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases > > This can be seen in ubuntu.svg > > This change for Ubuntu unfortunately makes our nice clean plan above much > harder as it is impossible to support a release for anywhere near close to > 24 months on non-LTS Ubuntu distros. > > We started out be assuming we'd release ROS in the spring to coincide with > the LTS Ubuntu Release. If we're planning a 1 year release cycle, the > quick answer is that for the intervening 6 month Ubuntu Release the last > ROS release is ported forward. This can be done with a minimal effort by > following the Ubuntu by about 1 month, enabling a ROS release to be built > against the current release and the upcoming pre-release Ubuntu. (Based on > past experiences prebuilds of Ubuntu releases are available shortly after > the previous release has come out.) With this basic outline we can release > ROS each spring and support two Ubuntu distros each. > > In recognition of the fact that many users only use LTS on their robots we > then thought to add a backport of the ROS release with LTS+2 to build on > the LTS. However the fact that the LTS+2 release will also be built on the > LTS+3 makes supporting this spanning set very hard because LTS+3 is usually > the staging grounds for large changes to get into the next LTS release. > > To see this see graphic ubuntu_ros.svg > > To resolve this there are many options. We could consider dropping > support for LTS+3 to resolve the large spanning set. Another option is to > simply support the LTS Ubuntu Releases since the non LTS release cycles are > now so short, making our 24 month support cycle much easier. > > > You will note in this process that we have decreased the matrix of ROS vs > Ubuntu packages. This is purposeful as we've identified supporting the > large matrix of ROS vs Ubuntu distros as a significant burden on the > community. Our sketch is laid out to support two major use cases, a stable > developer who wants to stick to the LTS Ubuntu release and the cutting edge > user who wants the latest version of ROS on the latest Ubuntu distro. > > Besides the provided Debian package it is always easily possible to build > a ROS distribution from source. It only requires running a handful of > commands. A complete build of desktop-full takes about 3-4 hours of > compilation time on a recent Intel i7 machine. This is the workflow that > every non-Ubuntu user uses which has been continuously improved as we have > upgraded the core tools. > > And the last consideration is when should we release Hydro, we have close > to half the packages for Hydro released and I know many of the remaining > packages which were in the initial groovy release are preparing for the > hydro release at the moment. From the considerations of synchronizing with > Ubuntu LTS it seems like a good target for Indigo Igloo will be April/May > 2014 leaving us 11 months from now. As a straw man for Hydro I'd propose > July giving the Indigo cycle 9 months following Hydro 7 months to ease us > into the 12 month cycle. > > Please let us know your thoughts? > > Tully > > * > > _______________________________________________ > ros-users mailing list > ros-users@code.ros.org > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users > >