[ros-users] ROS 2.0 Strategy review

Mon Sep 28 21:22:50 UTC 2015

It's great to see this discussion happening.  I'll just add that,
while some people from OSRF and other groups have taken the time to
participate and may continue to do so in the future, you shouldn't
consider this wiki page to represent anything other than the
opinion(s) of the author(s).  If a "claim" hasn't been "rebutted" or
"refuted," that doesn't imply that the claim has been substantiated or
that anyone agrees with it.  To quote from our Support page
(http://wiki.ros.org/Support#Etiquette): "If you didn't get a response
then likely nobody has had time to answer you."

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 4:23 PM, Bill Morris via ros-users
<ros-users at lists.ros.org> wrote:
> 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
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> ros-users mailing list
>>>>> ros-users at lists.ros.org
>>>>> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> William Woodall
>>> ROS Development Team
>>> william at osrfoundation.org
>>> http://wjwwood.io/
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