[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [ROS Projects] Maintainer best practices handling chages thorugh ROS releases

[ROS Discourse]

While I've been working in the different pull requests in gazebo_ros_pkgs I come up with doubts about how would be the best policy to handle changes in the different branches that we host there for every ROS release. As of now gazebo_ros_pkgs currently support changes in: Indigo, Jade and Kinetic. All of them officially released and supported. Contributors are submitting pull requests against any of the released branches and we usually cherry-pick the changes to the rest of the branches but the whole process is arbitrary and not documented in any way.

I can see that we have different kind of changes that will impact on users, at least:

* Bugs (mainly things that are broken)
* Changes to the API
* Changes to the ABI (looking at catkin ws users)
* Changes that affect rostopic/roslaunch/rosparams/... names or arguments.
* Changes that affect behaviour (some of them are bug fixes)

My main point is: in which ROS release would be reasonable to introduce a change that forces consumers of the ROS packages to have to react to adapt to the change having in mind that some of them would be not trivial to detect?

Thanks






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