I just wanted to add a +1 to both Tully and all the folks at OSRF for polling the community on this issue and working to find a well-balanced solution. It just confirms my belief that ROS is here to stay and will continue to take over the world. :-) --patrick http://www.pirobot.org On 05/30/2013 04:46 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