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
>
>
> *
>
>
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