Thank you @gbiggs for your efforts getting our committee up and running!
Right now, the infrastructure project is predominantly focused on helping the Foundation transition to its new structure and building out the technical framework and knowledge base for sharing operational responsibility and our bandwidth for other activities is extremely limited. That work is both highly sensitive and timing critical and so the profile of community contributions has been different, and will continue to be for the next couple of months, than what I hope to achieve long term.
In addition to keeping the web and build infrastructure running smoothly, which like any set of web services requires constant upkeep, proactive maintenance, and occasional incident response, we are also helping the OSRF’s projects with platform support. Most recently ROS 2 Rolling (and thus the upcoming Iron release) has successfully transitioned its target RHEL platform from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 and we are preparing to add support for Debian Bookwork to the ROS bootstrap layer of packages. We are also looking ahead to next year already, as the work to prepare ROS and Gazebo for Ubuntu 24.04 starts this summer and picks up heavily in the fall after the 23.10 release.
As the transition work draws to a close, we’ll also start working on the first public Infrastructure roadmap for OSRF projects and infrastructure community meetings. Those meetings will be announced here and on the Gazebo Community discourse as well. In the meantime you can find us in the GitHub issues and pull requests doing infrastructure work, here on Discourse, and on the OSRF community discord in the Infrastructure related channels.
There is not a current complete inventory, and there are a good number of repositories which overlap between infrastructure and the Foundation’s other project teams and which are spread across multiple organizations. The gazebo-tooling organization also includes a number of important infrastructure related repositories as does the osrf organization itself. Any project which is critical for the continuing delivery and developer experience for OSRF projects will have some amount of participation from Infrastructure, just as they always have.
ROS has always been a federated ecosystem, and with a few exceptions to support automation, there has never been a requirement that repositories be housed in specific organizations (or even on GitHub at all) in order to be part of the infrastructure. Depending on what you are looking to do, I’d suggest just setting up a repository under your own namespace and sharing it with the community on Discourse.
The Infrastructure team within Open Robotics has been meeting weekly for several years and we’ve had a couple of office hours events which were open to the public.
With the new project committee structure I want to increase the community participation opportunities, borrowing even more from the Gazebo community meetings structure.
Project Committee meetings will likely remain invite-only, but we will also be expanding the scope of the community reviewer role and including them in the project committee going forward.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here. Are you asking how the community can contribute changes which fulfill outstanding infrastructure requirements and goals or how the community can add requirements to the infrastructure team’s roadmap?