[ros-users] Call for maintainers

Tully Foote tfoote at osrfoundation.org
Wed Apr 9 17:32:12 UTC 2014


Hi everyone,

The ROS Indigo release is coming up (expected release date in May of 2014)
and we here at OSRF have taken stock of which packages we can reasonably
maintain ourselves and for which packages we will need community help. Here
is a list of packages required for the variants "desktop" as well as
"desktop_full"  for Indigo:

http://wiki.ros.org/indigo/Planning/Maintenance

The lists on the above wiki page have many holes, but fortunately we have
excellent community members who are helping us maintain parts of the ROS
packages and that is not yet captured in the above wiki page. However, even
with their contributions, there is a shortfall in the maintenance coverage
of packages.

These listings are based on the drafted REP 142 definitions of the
metapackages.

http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0142.html

We understand that historically it has been difficult to know what packages
need help being maintained, so we added the maintenance status to the
debbuild status page for each ROS distribution. Here are the packages
currently released into Indigo (sorted by maintenance status):

http://www.ros.org/debbuild/indigo.html?s=5&r=1

Here is a page which shows a side-by-side comparison of the packages and
versions released into the Groovy, Hydro and Indigo distributions:

http://www.ros.org/debbuild/compare_groovy_hydro_indigo.html

This is where you all come in! We encourage everyone to look through that
list and consider a few things:

 * If you are the maintainer of a package that has a status of 'unknown',
please update the status. You can run `bloom-release -r indigo -t indigo
<package name> -p` to have bloom set the status and open a pull request for
you or you can edit the distro file directly and let github open the pull
request for you:
https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/edit/master/indigo/distribution.yaml

 * If you see that a package you commonly use is marked as 'unknown' or
'unmaintained', then consider contacting the listed maintainer by email
and/or the ros-release at lists.ros.org mailing list, to see how you can help
with maintenance.

 * If you see that a package you commonly use is not listed at all,
consider contacting the maintainer and/or the ros-release mailing list to
see if you can help with maintenance. You can see which packages are
released into Hydro but not Indigo here:
http://www.ros.org/debbuild/compare_hydro_indigo.html

Even if a package that you find useful is released into Indigo and marked
as maintained, we encourage you to contact the maintainer or visit the
issue tracker for the package and see if you can help out. Issue trackers
for the packages can usually be found on the wiki page for that package,
e.g. 'http://wiki.ros.org/<package name>'.

When reporting bugs or suggesting enhancements (whether big or small), keep
in mind that package maintainers, including those of us here at OSRF, have
limited time to devote to servicing incoming issues.  As a general rule,
we'll try to attend to serious bugs quickly, but enhancements, especially
for mature packages, will take lower priority.  You'll almost always get a
quicker result if the bug report / feature request comes paired with a
working implementation of the fix.

ROS is a community effort and it needs help from the community to succeed.
So, if you find something useful then we strongly encourage you to try and
give back!

Thanks,
Your ROS Team
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