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Foxy API freeze coming up

Next Generation ROS
#1

The coronavirus pandemic is a major disruption for all of us. At the very least most of us are suddenly working full-time from home, some are officially supposed to be not working at all right now and some might be unable to work. At this point it’s unrealistic for us to expect that everyone will hit their previously agreed deadlines for the Foxy release.

Given the general level of disruption and conversations that we’ve had with specific individuals, we are delaying the dates on the Foxy timeline up to two weeks. The goal is to allow significant ongoing development to complete and land in time for the upcoming API and feature freeze.

To clarify the modified timeline:

  • If changes considered essential land before the two weeks extension has elapsed the API and feature freeze will happen right away (not before the original date of Apr 8th though). Therefore you should not rely on these extra two weeks but still aim to meet the original deadline to land any contributions to the ros_core packages.
  • If changes don’t land even within the two weeks extension the API and feature freeze will happen anyway (even without these changes since the release timeline is generally date driven and not feature driven).
  • The subsequent dates will likely shift by the same duration the API and feature freeze date has shifted and will be updated accordingly once the API and feature freeze has happened.

Your friendly ROS team

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#2

@dirk-thomas, would you share some latest progress on pushing Foxy release packages into the “rosdistro/foxy/distribution.yaml”?

I noticed quite some ROS2 core components are not in the distro yaml so far. Packages depending on those core components shall be delivered later to avoid rosdep failures.
In order to meet the Foxy timeline, is there any ways to bypass those rosdep failures? Or shall we wait for the core components added to the distro yaml?

I’m working on ROS2 Realsense release, for the Foxy release commitments we made on #830. Thanks.

-Sharron

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#3

We expect the API / feature freeze of ROS code packages to happen no later than on the 22nd (as described above).

The API / feature freeze deadline doesn’t imply that all packages are released by then. It only says that we don’t expect breaking API changes or significant features to land in ROS core packages afterwards. Since changes likely happen until close to the deadline you can expect those packages to be released with bloom shortly after that. The timeline plans for a five day window until binary packages up to desktop are available.

Your packages can only be released once all dependencies have been released. If you check the Foxy timeline you will see that you only need to get your packages released before the last date (the rosdistro freeze) to make sure your packages are available on the release date of Foxy. Of course the earlier something gets released the more time it as to soak, be tested, and be iterated on.

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#4

Got clarified. Thanks!

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#5

Thanks @dirk-thomas clarification, it is very clear to us.
I and @sharronliu are working to integrate ROS2 Realsense package to Foxy, and we observe some dependency packages (image_transport, rclcpp, rclcpp_components, tf2, tf2_ros, launch_ros, etc) are not included in the latest build. Hopefully they will be added soon so that we can catch the window to integrate ROS2 realsense package. May we get more info on this?

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