[ros-users] ROS 2.0 Strategy review

[William Woodall]

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 2:28 PM, Bill Smart via ros-users <
ros-users at lists.ros.org> wrote:

> Thibault,
>
> Thanks for the review.  I've only been paying sporadic attention to the
> ROS2 process of late, and this was a useful reminder of the state of some
> things.
>
> I'm looking forward to hearing more about the status of ROS2 next week at
> ROSCon and, in particular, it would be great to get a response from the
> developers on some of the things in this document.  As an example, rebuttal
> 1.1 says "This will eventually be okay when everyone uses ROS2.", which I
> believe, but claim 3.2 suggests that this will not happen for a "long
> time".  It would be more reassuring if I had some idea of whether a "long
> time" is a few months or several years.
>
> Primarily, I worry about the community splitting in the time required to
> do the migration, and then never coming back together again.  My fear is
> that everyone will pick one version to work in, and it will lead to two
> communities (perhaps academic and industrial).  This would undermine one of
> the core strengths of ROS: it's community.
>
> I'll also note that the word "hopefully" appears in 40% of the rebuttals.
> Many of these have a claim of the form "I think that X will be a problem",
> and a rebuttal of "Hopefully X will not be a problem".  Hope, as
> Rudy Giuliani said, is not a strategy.
>

Bill,

I haven't had time to respond to each of the claims (not that time wasn't
given, I just haven't had it this week). But I think it's important to
point out that all of the substantive edits to the review wiki page were
made by Thibault, including the rebuttals (there are currently 44 edits to
the wiki). He helped the discussion along by taking responses from the
mailing list conversation about the review and put them in the wiki:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ros-sig-ng-ros/coG7Wdkbb4E

I think that's really useful, but if you search that thread, "hope" is only
used once and it's by Thibault. So I wouldn't read too much into the
language of the rebuttals, I think that's more a mannerism of how Thibault
writes.

That's not to say that the arguments presented there don't convey a sense
of "well hopefully this won't happen", but I also don't think that all the
rebuttals on the wiki represent the best argument against the claims. I
only have myself to blame for not getting my own rebuttals in the wiki
before the deadline. I'll hopefully have time after ROSCon add my own
rebuttals to the wiki.

-- William


>
> -- Bill
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 11:49 AM, Thibault Kruse via ros-users <
> ros-users at lists.ros.org> wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I would like to present a review of the strategy taken to create ROS2.
>>
>> Recently OSRF announced the release of an 'alpha1' ROS2 milestone [1].
>> The list of missing features is still quite long. That also means some
>> opportunity to still influence decisions.
>>
>> OSRF has been promoting ROS2 at ROSCon2014 [2], and provides
>> documentation [3]. As a reminder, major goals include improving real
>> time robotics, embedded robotics, Windows-compatibility, messaging
>> over unreliable networks and multi-robot scenarios.
>>
>> All changes come at a cost, there are tradeoffs to be made. I have
>> initiated several discussions in the NG mailing list [4] to preview
>> the impact of ROS2.
>>
>> The short version is that currently ROS2 has completely separate
>> sources and requires different core tools (e.g. a buildsystem that is
>> not compatible with catkin), and many APIs have breaking changes. The
>> migration to ROS2 will take similar effort as migrating all ROS
>> packages to a different middleware. A long transition period is
>> likely. Supporting packages in parallel for both ROS1 and ROS2 will be
>> very hard. Because of the lack of backwards compatibility, the
>> transition to ROS2 will probably be a large disruption to everyone
>> using ROS (https://i.imgflip.com/rl3g1.jpg).
>>
>> The long version is here:
>> http://wiki.ros.org/sig/NextGenerationROS/StrategyReview
>>
>> I announced that wiki review page one week ago on the NG mailing list
>> and tried to include feedback. Thanks to all who gave feedback.
>>
>> Please use the NG mailing list for feedback about ROS2:
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ros-sig-ng-ros
>>
>> regards,
>>   Thibault
>>
>>
>>
>> [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ros-sig-ng-ros/B4BAQY5c3xs
>> [2]
>> http://www.osrfoundation.org/wordpress2/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ROSCON-2014-Why-you-want-to-use-ROS-2.pdf
>> [3] http://design.ros2.org/
>> [4] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ros-sig-ng-ros
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>
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-- 
William Woodall
ROS Development Team
william at osrfoundation.org
http://wjwwood.io/
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