I was one of the people that initiated this because in the course of the AVP 2020 we realized that rosbag2 was simply useless for us (topics missing in the bag, messages not being recorded, the tool crashing) and the only reason that we were able to bring that project to the end was because of the LGSVL simulator and because of the (extremely inconvenient) debugging in the car.
We also hear the same complaints from the industry players: How to use RTI Recording Service with ROS2 | by Nickolai Belakovski | Medium.
So because rosbag2 is not working this is what happened:
- our customers built their own record/replay tools (which means that they are not building on the
rosbag2) - we patched
rosbag2in our internal fork of ROS 2 to the point that you could almost say that it is a different product (which means again that we are not building on therosbag2)
So while I agree with building on top of the stability rather than the latest and greatest - rosbag2 is the one exception in ROS 2 that should’ve been addressed ASAP.
We have however created this post to hear from the average users and to gauge the impact of making an API/ABI breakage. The things that we would like to hear are “I am using rosbag2 API in such and such way” and then we can see if upgrading the user will be easy or not.