[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Packaging and Release Management] Time for reviewing ROS distro release cycle?

[Tully Foote]

It's definitely something we might want to consider. However I'd suggest that doing this now is not the best time. Our next release, melodic, is another LTS version so it won't make a lot of sense to make this sort of decision over a year an a half ahead of the next effected potential release.

The cited statistics have some shortcoming on making a decision like this, we'll need to collect more information. In particular I'll point out that we're very early in the cycle of Lunar. It's a relatively new distro and it's only been available for a few months. For example [in 2016](http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/metrics-report-2016-07.pdf) Kinetic was just at 11%. Clearly that had higher adoption than lunar does but judging adoption this early in the cycle is a little premature to say that it is not worth supporting.

There are also issues that if we only have the LTS releases we will be unable to support all Ubuntu versions as well as Fedora and Debian versions that do not line up with our release cycle. There are hardware systems that need newer kernels and other systems often for driver support and sometimes can't run on older Ubuntu LTS releases.

However since we can't take any action now, I would suggest that if we are to have this discussion we would wait until a little before the 'melodic' release when we will have close to a year's worth of data for Lunar and start looking forward for ROS N at which time we could review it's timing or support period.





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