[ros-users] ROS Distribution: Box Turtle Release

[Ken Conley]

Our first ROS Distribution release is here: Box Turtle. You can read
our announcement at:

http://www.ros.org/news/2010/03/ros-distributions-box-turtle-release.html

Kudos to Morgan Quigley for bringing apt-get to ROS!

For developers, we want to highlight a few more things that come with
this release. The first is that we are providing support (i.e. bug
fixes) for the 1.0 stacks in this release, which cover most of our
core capabilities, like navigation.

Second, our bleeding edge development will be in the "Latest" release,
out of which we will hatch "C Turtle".

We strongly encourage transitioning off of:

 https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/all/

as it links against these bleeding-edge versions. Our ROS installation
instructions [1] provide 'rosinstall' files with several
configurations for SVN checkout. You can also fetch all of our
released stacks (including PR2 stacks) from:

  https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/externals/boxturtle/

Third, we want to say thank you, especially to the early adopters, for
sticking with us as ROS went through its growing pains to reach this
first distribution. We've done our best to take your feedback about
stability, documentation, and tutorials, and tried to roll it into our
first ROS distribution. There were many deprecations and changes along
the way, but we've now arrived at a new release process that
identifies stable libraries and provides an easier migration process
forward. We hope this will provide what you've been looking for. If
not, we're always listening for feedback.

Finally, to repeat an administrative note, wg-ros-pkg/trunk/sandbox
has been emptied and deprecated packages deleted. We've created a
boxturtle branch of wg-ros-pkg/trunk [2] that you can checkout on top
of  Box Turtle.

There are a lot of cool things in the works for C Turtle. In the
meantime, enjoy Box Turtle and let us know what you think!

 -- your friendly neighborhood ROS turtle hatchery

[1]: http://ros.org/wiki/ROS/Installation
[2]: https://code.ros.org/svn/wg-ros-pkg/branches/trunk_boxturtle/