[ros-users] ROS 2.0 Strategy review

[Bill Morris]

Perhaps is makes sense to add a note in bold at the top identifying that
the document is a work in progress and some of the arguments are still
awaiting clarification and revision.
This note could possibly link to
http://wiki.ros.org/sig/NextGenerationROS/StrategyReview#Reviewers
To re-emphasise who has edited the document.

On 09/25/2015 06:23 PM, Thibault Kruse via ros-users wrote:
> 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
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>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>> --
>> William Woodall
>> ROS Development Team
>> william at osrfoundation.org
>> http://wjwwood.io/
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