[ros-users] ROS Release Timeline

Patrick Goebel patrick at pirobot.org
Fri May 31 13:52:55 UTC 2013


I just wanted to add a +1 to both Tully and all the folks at OSRF for 
polling the community on this issue and working to find a well-balanced 
solution.  It just confirms my belief that ROS is here to stay and will 
continue to take over the world. :-)

--patrick

http://www.pirobot.org


On 05/30/2013 04:46 PM, Tully Foote wrote:
> *
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
>
> As a follow up to the survey we circulated last month I'd like to 
> start a discussion of what the best timeline for ROS releases would be.
>
>
> As a reminder of the survey results see: 
> https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzNmzxy4pVGMZHd2b1BSWVlHVHM/edit
>
>
> We've had many discussions here at OSRF about these results and have 
> come up with a few candidates which seem reasonable.  I'll outline the 
> logic behind how we got to them and would like to hear what you think.
>
>
> Starting out based on the survey.  We had a majority of respondants 
> prefering a 12 month release cycle and a plurality of respondants 
> preferring a 24 month support period.  These two number nicely allign 
> with our current practice of having two supported ROS distributions at 
> a time with one ROS distribution in development, however just with a 
> longer release cycle.  This amount of parallel development is about 
> all that we think we can support as a community.  So based on this I 
> think there's a relatively clear mandate to change the ROS release 
> cycle to every 12 months with 24 months of support, allowing 12 months 
> of overlap between releases for transition.
>
>
> We've put together a nice graphic see ros.svg
>
>
> Unfortunately the problem is not quite as simple as the above graphic 
> shows as we need to build on top of other platforms.  Ubuntu has 
> recently updated their planned release cycle to support LTS for 5 
> years, but non-LTS releases for only 9 months while maintaining their 
> 6 month release cycle.  See: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
>
>
> This can be seen in ubuntu.svg
>
>
> This change for Ubuntu unfortunately makes our nice clean plan above 
> much harder as it is impossible to support a release for anywhere near 
> close to 24 months on non-LTS Ubuntu distros.
>
>
> We started out be assuming we'd release ROS in the spring to coincide 
> with the LTS Ubuntu Release.  If we're planning a 1 year release 
> cycle, the quick answer is that for the intervening 6 month Ubuntu 
> Release the last ROS release is ported forward.  This can be done with 
> a minimal effort by following the Ubuntu by about 1 month, enabling a 
> ROS release to be built against the current release and the upcoming 
> pre-release Ubuntu. (Based on past experiences prebuilds of Ubuntu 
> releases are available shortly after the previous release has come 
> out.) With this basic outline we can release ROS each spring and 
> support two Ubuntu distros each.
>
>
> In recognition of the fact that many users only use LTS on their 
> robots we then thought to add a backport of the ROS release with LTS+2 
> to build on the LTS.  However the fact that the LTS+2 release will 
> also be built on the LTS+3 makes supporting this spanning set very 
> hard because LTS+3 is usually the staging grounds for large changes to 
> get into the next LTS release.
>
>
> To see this see graphic ubuntu_ros.svg
>
>
> To resolve this there are many options.  We could consider dropping 
> support for LTS+3 to resolve the large spanning set.  Another option 
> is to simply support the LTS Ubuntu Releases since the non LTS release 
> cycles are now so short, making our 24 month support cycle much easier.
>
>
>
> You will note in this process that we have decreased the matrix of ROS 
> vs Ubuntu packages.  This is purposeful as we've identified supporting 
> the large matrix of ROS vs Ubuntu distros as a significant burden on 
> the community.  Our sketch is laid out to support two major use cases, 
> a stable developer who wants to stick to the LTS Ubuntu release and 
> the cutting edge user who wants the latest version of ROS on the 
> latest Ubuntu distro.
>
>
> Besides the provided Debian package it is always easily possible to 
> build a ROS distribution from source. It only requires running a 
> handful of commands.  A complete build of desktop-full takes about 3-4 
> hours of compilation time on a recent Intel i7 machine. This is the 
> workflow that every non-Ubuntu user uses which has been continuously 
> improved as we have upgraded the core tools.
>
>
> And the last consideration is when should we release Hydro, we have 
> close to half the packages for Hydro released and I know many of the 
> remaining packages which were in the initial groovy release are 
> preparing for the hydro release at the moment.  From the 
> considerations of synchronizing with Ubuntu LTS it seems like a good 
> target for Indigo Igloo will be April/May 2014 leaving us 11 months 
> from now.  As a straw man for Hydro I'd propose July giving the Indigo 
> cycle 9 months following Hydro 7 months to ease us into the 12 month 
> cycle.
>
>
> Please let us know your thoughts?
>
>
> Tully
>
>
> *
>
>
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