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

[Dirk Thomas]

[quote="tfoote, post:3, topic:2744"]
There are hardware systems that need newer kernels and other systems often for driver support and sometimes cant run on older Ubuntu LTS releases.
[/quote]

For Ubuntu this is being addressed by newer releases of LTS distros, e.g. 16.04.3 will ship with a newer kernel and drivers as 16.04 originally did. So I don't see a need to support for non-LTS Ubuntu distros. For Fedora and Debian that is certainly different since their newer version might not be available when a certain ROS LTS release is being prepared.

[quote="tfoote, post:3, topic:2744"]
The cited statistics have some shortcoming on making a decision like this, well need to collect more information.
[/quote]

[quote="tfoote, post:3, topic:2744"]
However since we cant 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 years worth of data for Lunar and start looking forward for ROS N at which time we could review its timing or support period.
[/quote]

I think these two things don't go well together. Since the statistics do have some shortcomings they should be addressed now. Otherwise when we want to revisit the decision in a year+ we might simply not have the data we need to make an informed decision.

E.g. the download numbers vary highly dependent on the number of releases and which packages are being released. That needs to be normalized for a useful comparison. Additionally it could be that many downloads are not coming from users but robots being updated or CI jobs being run. While those are certainly "using" a specific ROS distro they might skew the statistics too.

There are also other options to consider. Between LTS releases every two years we could follow a rolling release (which at the end of the two years becomes the next LTS). That way we can track newer Linux distributions when they come out. The question would be if enough users would care to use such a rolling release?





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