[ros-users] ROS 2.0 Strategy review

[Thibault Kruse]

Indeed, sorry, I should have clarified the nature of the rebuttals. So
far, the rebuttals on the wiki are written by me, trying to represent
the position opposite to mine as best I understood it.

I did not want to leave claims unanswered on the page when there had
been arguments in the discussions, and I did neither want to wait for
others to have the time nor force others to respond so I added
rebuttals myself.

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 11:43 PM, William Woodall
<william at osrfoundation.org> wrote:
> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ros-users mailing list
>>> ros-users at lists.ros.org
>>> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ros-users mailing list
>> ros-users at lists.ros.org
>> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>
>
>
>
> --
> William Woodall
> ROS Development Team
> william at osrfoundation.org
> http://wjwwood.io/