[ros-users] Developers: ROS Fuerte Planning SIGs

[Ken Conley]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Jack O'Quin <jack.oquin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Ken Conley <kwc at willowgarage.com> wrote:
>
>> The follow-up process is also very simple:
>>
>>  1. Each SIG designates a SIG Coordinator.  If an SIG cannot agree on
>> a coordinator, one will be chosen for you.
>>  2. The coordinator will organize planning meeting(s) for the SIG.
>> This can be over IRC, video chat, at IROS, or whatever medium bests
>> fits the composition of your SIG. The deadline for these meetings is
>> September 28th.
>>  3. Each SIG group will post their planning notes as a sub-page of
>> http://ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Planning/<SIG-NAME>.  The deadline for
>> posting these notes is September 30th.  SIGs can have followup
>> meetings, but this initial deadline is to ensure that the SIG is
>> activated.
>>
>> The plans are just that -- plans.  It is up to the members of each SIG
>> to achieve as much of that plan as possible in time for the freeze
>> dates of ROS Fuerte (remember, there's always Groovy Galapagos).
>
> To guide the SIG deliberations, what freeze dates are anticipated for Fuerte?
>
> That should help the groups come up with realistic estimates of what
> should be done for this release.

I'm open to suggestions on this one.  For earlier releases, we've had
up to 3 release dates to stagger in changes; for Electric we had just
one freeze date.   The overall system is now much more stable and our
continuous integration systems are much better, such that it is
possible to get 'fresher' software into the final release.  That said,
the Electric single freeze made for a fairly chaotic period and felt
more like a paper deadline with everyone releasing on the final date.

My strawman proposal for this round (thanks Troy for the 'slushy' term):

January 15: Slushy Freeze - APIs with dependencies frozen
February 15: Final Freeze - packaging complete, all APIs frozen
March 15: Fuerte Release

Basically, if your stack is a leaf or has few dependencies, then your
freeze is 1 month prior to release.  If your stack has dependencies,
the stuff that is depended on freezes 2 months prior to release.
Drivers generally fall into the few dependencies category, unless you
are planning on (for example) changing the camera topics.

On a related note, I would like to make unstable more 'unstable' this
time around.  During Electric, unstable was actually incredibly
stable, which slowed updates to lower-level software, and the feedback
we've gotten is very few people are actually using unstable.  In order
to help lower-level stacks develop more quickly (i.e. the stuff I work
on), I would like to let unstable be unstable for the next two months.
 After that, we would try to re-stabilizing unstable so that people
can dogfood new features.

 - Ken

> --
>  joq
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