[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Discussion on ROS to ROS2 transition plan

[Bill Smart]

I'm coming late to the discussion here, but it seems like there are a couple points that are being conflated.  I totally agree with @Martin_Guenther that ROS API changes are hard things to live through.  I've been using ROS since before Mango Tango, and I shudder when I think of some of the transitions we've had to go through.  However, I also agree with @mkhansen that not releasing another LTS after Melodic doesn't kill ROS next year.  Much of my lab is still on Indigo because some of our robots are locked to particular ROS version, and the pain of upgrading outweighs the lack of recency of our version.  If there were no more releases after Indigo, I wouldn't have cared.  Of course, everyone's use cases are different, but I don't think it's accurate to say that ROS1 is over if there's no N-Turtle.  If does, however, start the clock ticking.

I guess that, for me, it breaks down to the question of "Are the improvements in ROS2 worth the pain of migrating all of my code?".  We've got a lot of code, and that would be a significant pain.  Personally, I think that ROS2 will be better (for me and my students) than ROS1 is, once we get some features in place (looking at you actions and the new nav stack).  Given that we have to upgrade from Indigo next April in any case, I might just bite to bullet and move to ROS2.

In the end, I think that the question of limited resources might be the most powerful one.  If Open Robotics has N hours to work on ROS, how many should they spend on ROS1 and how many on ROS2.  If we need M hours of work to make ROS2 viable, then the math is simple; more time on ROS1 means a longer time until ROS2 is ready.

The worst thing we can do is fork.  If this happens (and it's a non-zero probability event, for the reasons the @Martin_Guenther lists), that's bad for everyone.





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