+1 here too.  IMHO, this approach has awesomeness written all over it.

--patrick


On 2/27/2014 3:33 PM, Sachin Chitta wrote:
> Dear MoveIt! and ROS users,
>
> I wanted to give you information about how MoveIt! will be dealing 
> with the new ROS distro Indigo.
>
> Based on feedback from the MoveIt! survey conducted last year and 
> prior experience from the PR2, we know that most robots seem to lag 
> the most recent ROS release by a significant time period (a year or 
> more sometimes). We would like to encourage MoveIt! adoption on more 
> and more robots and also give people time to catch up but still be 
> able to use the newest features in MoveIt! with their robot. We have 
> used this information to formulate our strategy around ROS Indigo (at 
> least in the near-term).
>
> We will *not* branch and develop separately for Indigo. The version of 
> MoveIt! in Indigo will be a near copy of that in Hydro. New features, 
> bug-fixes, etc. will continue to go into Hydro - there are almost 
> always ways to do this without having to break API and we will try to 
> maintain API stability. Everything new that is being released into 
> Hydro will also be ported into Indigo releases. This will allow both 
> users working with the latest distributions and users working with 
> older distributions to keep using MoveIt!.
>
> Let me know if there are any questions/comments about this.
>
> Best Regards,
> Sachin
>
>
> Sachin Chitta
> Associate Director
> Robotics Systems and Software
> SRI International