[ros-users] Groovy Release Planning Update

[Tully Foote]

Hi Everyone,

We have been making good progress on preparations for the Groovy release.
 You can see the latest full builds in our testing repo.  The output is
synced to http://www.ros.org/debbuild/groovy_testing.txt regularly.

There are now well over 150 stacks building, including all the core ROS
packages.  I have setup a page at:
http://www.ros.org/debbuild/groovy_critical_dependencies_precise_amd64.txtto
help understand what's missing.  Every stack which is failing to build
is listed, and the stacks that depend on broken stacks are noted.
 Reviewing most of the broken stacks they are mostly due to deprecation
cycles finishing, and minor restructurings of underlying dependencies.  If
your stack is listed please review the build logs.  Note that each released
stack now has its own build job so it's much easier to find the latest
result.


Although we're making progress on getting the release out, there is one
major change outstanding from the Buildsystem SIG [1].  The outstanding
change is to switch to packaging at the package level and not the stack
level.  The primary discussion is this thread  [2] and the details are
currently being reviewed in REP 127 via the SIG. [3]

As this change is large and we are within a month of the planned Groovy
release the standard option would be to delay the feature until Hydro.
 However when we consider the migration path for users migrating to the
current Groovy implementation and then again migrating to the new proposal
will cause a lot of overhead on the entire ROS community.  This double
migration can be avoided if the current Groovy implementation is not
released to the community.  Another option is to not make the second
change, however the support of the SIG was strongly in favor of the new
system, and it has significant benefits suggesting that it's worth the
effort.

To avoid this double migration for the community I plan to push back the
Groovy release to make sure that this change can be integrated effectively
and make sure that there is still soak time for beta testers to use the
software before the release.  The new target for the Groovy release will be
November 15th, with a Beta available on October 15th for full system
testing.

I have updated the Groovy Planning page [4] to reflect the new deadlines.
 Looking forward I expect that we will shorten the development cycle to
keep in sync with the Ubuntu releases.


Tully


[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/ros-sig-buildsystem
[2]
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/ros-sig-buildsystem/GSHy2dI39gY
[3] http://ros.org/reps/rep-0127.html
[4] http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Planning
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