[ros-users] ROS Groovy Beta Release 1

[Tully Foote]

 Hi Everyone,

We are pleased to announce the ROS Groovy Galapagos Beta 1 Release is
available for download!

In this release we have focused on core infrastructure.  The core build
tools prototyped in Fuerte have been significantly refined.  We have
upgrade the continuous integration and documentation infrastructure to be
more modular and enable scaling better.

One of the core upgrades has been the buildsystem catkin, which is based on
CMake.  It has been designed to provide the core usability of the rosbuild
ecosystem but converge to more standard software engineering practices.
 For more information on catkin please see the [catkin wiki page](
http://www.ros.org/wiki/catkin)  and the associated tutorials](
http://www.ros.org/wiki/catkin/Tutorials)

There has also been a significant overhaul of the core tutorials. It is
recommended to review and reference back to them:
http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials all the Tutorials beyond Creating A
Package have been converted to support the new and old build system.

For instructions installing please visit the [Groovy installation page](
http://ros.org/wiki/groovy/Installation). There are currently well over 300
packages building successful on all three supported Ubuntu distros
(Oneiric, Precise, Quantal) with over 200 of them coming from ???. This
constitutes over 75% of the released packages from Fuerte.  During the beta
is a great time for maintainers of the stacks which are not currently
building to release their stacks for Groovy. The status of the builds can
be found on the [debbuild status page](http://www.ros.org/debbuild/)

There have been many other upgrades in the groovy development process.  One
of the larger upgrades involved changing the recommended gui framework from
Wx to Qt.  There is a new [rqt_gui](http://www.ros.org/wiki/rqt) which can
embed Python and C++ plugins. [Rviz](http://www.ros.org/wiki/rviz) has been
ported and has a new plugin API.  Almost all the core Wx based
visualization tools have been switched to have Qt equivalents, and those
that have not switched yet are expected to be ported very soon.

Three REPs have been released during the Groovy development cycle:
[REP 127  Specification of package manifest format](
http://ros.org/reps/rep-0127.html)
[REP 128  Naming Conventions for Catkin Based Workspaces](
http://ros.org/reps/rep-0128.html)
[REP 131  ROS Groovy Variants](http://ros.org/reps/rep-0131.html)

Ubuntu Users: Please make sure to use the Python tools from apt and not
pip.  The pip based installs tend to go out of date and not get updated
with the rest of the system.

Note: For the beta we have disabled 32 bit binaries to decrease the load on
the build farm.  They will be re-enabled during the beta testing cycle
before the full release.

Tully

PS To those of you in the US, Happy Thanksgiving!
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