On 31 May 2013 11:43, Daniel Stonier <
d.stonier@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 31 May 2013 08:46, Tully Foote <tfoote@osrfoundation.org> 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.
>> *
>>
>
>
> Took a perusal of the svg's to really sort out the puzzle of words above!
>
> I think groovy was what we would consider a 'staging ground' release for
> large changes. We had a vested interest in pursuing groovy for some of our
> use cases, but for the use cases where we are interested in using Ubuntu
> LTS releases, we probably wouldn't have missed groovy much at all. So I'm
> not sure there may be enough interest to warrant investing the effort to
> support big staging releases on LTS.
>
> I notice what you've drawn in ubuntu_ros.svg coincides with this thinking
> - i.e.
>
> i-turtle: LTS, LTS+1
> j-turtle: LTS+2, LTS+3 <- Staging Release
> k-turtle: NLTS, NLTS+1 (Next LTS)
>
Just realise that this would imply i-turtle and k-turtle have support for
24months, and j-turtle only 12months. That would be fine, though you could
also extend support for j-turtle into the first year of NLTS by which time
you would hope it had smoothed out the bumps.
>
> We usually have an interest at Yujin in pursuing both use cases - the
> latest *and* the stable (dependant on the project) and I think we could
> work with that quite happily. It also provides a mechanism for ros to
> introduce potentially disruptive changes (i.e. in LTS+2, LTS+3 releases)
> and get real feedback without disrupting the part of the community that
> needs to be stable.
>
> Cheers,
> Daniel.
>
> *
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Phone : +82-10-5400-3296 (010-5400-3296)
> Home: http://snorriheim.dnsdojo.com/
> Yujin R&D: http://rnd.yujinrobot.com/
>
>
--
Phone : +82-10-5400-3296 (010-5400-3296)
Home:
http://snorriheim.dnsdojo.com/
Yujin R&D:
http://rnd.yujinrobot.com/
(text/plain)