[ros-users] answers.ros.org is the hell

[Edwards, Shaun M.]

+1

Shaun Edwards
Senior Research Engineer
Manufacturing System Department


http://robotics.swri.org
http://rosindustrial.swri.org/
http://ros.swri.org<http://ros.swri.org/>
Join the ROS-Industrial Developers List<https://groups.google.com/group/swri-ros-pkg-dev/boxsubscribe>
Southwest Research Institute
210-522-3277

From: ros-users-bounces at code.ros.org [mailto:ros-users-bounces at code.ros.org] On Behalf Of Ken Conley
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 2:47 PM
To: User discussions
Subject: Re: [ros-users] answers.ros.org is the hell

To be fair, Fuerte was late as well, and the reasons that drove Fuerte to be late also fed into a longer cycle for Groovy.  The continued growth of ROS creates scaling issues-- it takes a significant effort to keep the thousands of package in ROS even compiling together, and the changes in Fuerte/Groovy were meant to make this easier in the future.  It would be nice to appreciative of these efforts.

  - Ken

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 2:24 AM, Thibault Kruse <kruset at in.tum.de<mailto:kruset at in.tum.de>> wrote:
On 18.02.2013 19:10, Yamokoski, JD (JSC-ER)[OCEANEERING SPACE SYSTEMS] wrote:
Software as complex and as large as ROS will have some bumps and bruises at a major release - but from the outside looking in, it appears as though too much was changed in this release (as evidenced by the above plus the longer than normal release cycle).
After Tully's response I'll add some comment to this now. Please consider also the following facts. Up to fuerte, ROS releases were managed by Ken Conley, who left for Google as announced in April 2012. So release management switched hands (I am not implying Tully is less capable, but I do know he has had several other dominant assignments at Willow Garage).

Also, in 2012 employees also left Willow Garage for spin-offs like Industrial Perception, OpenPerception OSRF and HiDof, as well as other jobs.

So among the people that left ROS world in 2012 are: Ken Conley, Troy Straszheim, Radu B. Rusu, Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Wim Meeussen, E. Gil Jones, Stu Glaser, Bhaskara Marthi (in random order). I would also count Brian Gerkey as being absent from the ROS world 2012 as far as ROS engineering goes, because building up OSRF itself seems to have been a lot of work with also a strong focus on Gazebo. If you don't know those names, you'll find most of them in this list of all time ROS contributors: http://www.ohloh.net/p/ros-pkg/contributors?query=&sort=commits (though that list does not span all of ROS, and needs updating for the switch to github). This does not count non-Willow Garage staff that moved away from the ROS world, such as PhD students being now finished and taking up jobs outside the ROS world.

Also note many of the poeple I listed left ROS world without doing any of:
- Announcing their departure to the ROS community
- Nominating successors as maintainers for the packages they maintained, or declaring the packages unmaintained
- Handing over issues assigned to them in issue trackers

Those ROS contributors also held a lot of knowledge about their packages and the ROS toolchain that had in the past been useful to prepare and validate previous releases, this knowledge was not available for the Groovy release. I can only guess that hiring and training new talents with such high fluctuation of key members of the ROS team cannot be expected to go smoothly.

So the problems you noted as well as the release date slippage are not (only) due to too many changes in the Groovy release.

_______________________________________________
ros-users mailing list
ros-users at code.ros.org<mailto:ros-users at code.ros.org>
https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/attachments/20130221/c82cb4ad/attachment-0004.html>