[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Discussion on ROS to ROS2 transition plan
Martin Günther
ros.discourse at gmail.com
Fri Sep 28 20:48:49 UTC 2018
I believe it's *way* too early to start talking about stopping support for ROS1. ROS2 does not yet even have feature parity with ROS1 (actionlib, navigation, you name it). Switching off the lights on ROS1 should be considered after 99% of developers have made the switch, not 5%.
* 2023 sounds like a long time, but that doesn't mean we can afford not to have any releases after melodic. We should continue the usual release cycle until that time at least, because we need new releases to upgrade to new versions of libraries, avoid introducing breaking API changes within a release and so on. Making melodic the last ROS1 release kills ROS *now*, not in 2023.
* Alienating ROS1 users won't magically turn them into ROS2 users. A monolithic company can simply allocate people to work on project B instead of project A. In an open source community, you have to win people over instead of trying to force them. The latter will simply lead to forks and probably a lot of chaos, confusion and pain for everyone.
* I anticipate a loooong transition period from ROS1 to ROS2. This is why interoperability is key, e.g. it should be made as easy as possible to maintain packages for both in a single repo, with patches being backported between the versions.
At this point, splitting the community will only harm ROS2. It hasn't reached a critical mass yet.
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