Happy to hear that you guys seem to have figured out a solution satisfying both the promise ob API stability as well as allowing better rosbag usability in foxy! Thanks for the work you are putting into this!
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Have to be careful adding warnings - that can break ci/test scripts that are overly reliant on parsing stdout
Just a note that "Futurize" foxy-future branch by emersonknapp · Pull Request #687 · ros2/rosbag2 · GitHub contains the “futurizing” changes - the base commit is not yet finalized, but this PR contains most, if not all, of the necessary changes to release rosbag2-future
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Hi, lots of effort has gone into… this discussion and after a month after consensus still the solution is not implemented (a month before Galactic release). Should we expect it to happen or better start thinking about Galacic?
The plan is to get this backport out around the same time as the Galactic release. Foxy will outlive Galactic, we expect to have users on it for another 2 years.
Hey all,
I know this has been the slowest discussion ever - but it’s an unanticipatedly difficult problem.
Based on technical details around how the ROS buildfarms work, and how Debian packages work, we’ve now decided that there is no (reasonable) way to distribute both a standard Foxy build and a “Foxy-future” build for rosbag2 through the APT repositories.
The latest conclusion is that we want to support two things:
- Backporting key performance improvements into the official Foxy build in an API/ABI-preserving way. This may require re-engineering some of the original improvements so that they pass these requirements.
- Anybody who wants to pitch in and help identify and backport these changes will be welcomed. The Tooling WG is a good place to discuss this live, but backport tickets on GitHub are also a fine way to go. We recommend opening an enhancement ticket that links back to the original improvement to mark that you are working on it.
- Maintain a
foxy-futurebranch on GitHub that users who want the “whole shebang” can use to build from source. This will be a snapshot of the development from approximately mid-March 2021, with a minimal patch for Foxy API compatibility. Now that Galactic is out, we plan to finalize this and update the documentation accordingly within the next 2 weeks.
Galactic is here. Mission Robotics says rosbag2 and are things are working brilliantly in Galactic
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As an additional note - we’re really close on "Futurize" foxy-future branch by emersonknapp · Pull Request #687 · ros2/rosbag2 · GitHub for those who are staying on Foxy - there’s only one small problem left. Any extra eyes might help! 
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I’ll call this a “final” note on this discussion.
The foxy-future branch is now officially merged and ready for use.
See the README for some info about it.
The branch is also mentioned in the foxy branch README, as well as in the Foxy recording/playback tutorial
We now have open a list of targeted PRs that we would like to try and backport to Foxy. Backport performance improvements to Foxy · Issue #657 · ros2/rosbag2 · GitHub lays out this list. Some may be fairly difficult and need significant rewrite to work on Foxy - this is acceptable for a non-breaking improvement. Please consider this post an open call-for-help for those who have bandwidth to attempt these backports. Note that API and ABI breakages will not be considered for release into Foxy.
Cheers!
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