[ros-users] Upcoming suspention of debian packaging for EOL Ubuntu distros

BiggsGeoffrey geoffrey.biggs at aist.go.jp
Thu Feb 4 02:48:38 UTC 2016


Hi Tully,


Can we get some clarification on what will happen to support for Ubuntu distributions more recent than Trusty (14.04, LTS)?


According to REP3, and subtracting end-of-life'd distributions, as of Feb 3 Indigo is supported on Trusty while Jade is supported on Trusty and Vivid. Nothing is supported on Wily.


As of Feb 4, this will change to both Indigo and Jade only being supported on Trusty. There will be no version of ROS that is supported on a version of Ubuntu released more recently than two years ago.


Kinetic is due for release in May of this year, so it is reasonable to assume that it will support Xenial (which will also be an LTS release). This leaves quite a gap between now and the release of a ROS distro supporting a recent Ubuntu version; that gap will grow if Kinetic is delayed.


I can't see anything in REP3 that addresses this situation. Is there a policy to deal with it? There was a gap in Ubuntu support between Hydro and Indigo as well, but it was not anywhere near as long.


What sort of work is required to get Jade supported on Wily? Is it worth the effort or, given that it's only updates that we will be lacking, should resources instead be put into making sure Kinetic is released on time (or earlier)?


Geoff


________________________________
From: ros-users <ros-users-bounces at lists.ros.org> on behalf of Tully Foote via ros-users <ros-users at lists.ros.org>
Sent: Thursday, 4 February 2016 6:59 a.m.
To: User discussions
Subject: [ros-users] Upcoming suspention of debian packaging for EOL Ubuntu distros

Hi Everyone,

As some of you may have been aware we have always planned to drop support for EOL'd Ubuntu distros, however we have not done so due to our build farm not being able to disable the builds without breaking users operating from source.

As announced last week we have rolled out our new build farm. One of the new features of the new build farm is that we can now disable specific target platforms for building new packages without removing all references to the target platform. This allows users to keep using the older distros if they want to continue building from source. And as always we will continue to keep the existing debian packages available. The only difference is that we no longer will be releasing updates.

For Indigo and Jade the Ubuntu distributions Saucy and Utopic have already reached their end of life. And Vivid's EOL is tomorrow. (See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases for EOL dates.)  And as such we plan to stop building for those platforms by the end of this month.


For maintainers we are staging a sync at the moment. We expect one final sync in the middle of February to be the final one before we turn off the builds for Saucy,  Utopic, and Vivid. Please keep that in mind as you plan your upcoming releases.

In the future when other Ubuntu versions reach EOL we expect to stop building for them promptly after the EOL date since at that time Ubuntu will also no longer be providing updates as well.

Tully
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