The Infrastructure team at Open Robotics is responsible for maintaining and developing the computer infrastructure and tools which keep Gazebo and ROS building. Each project has accumulated a number of services, tools, and practices that service those needs. Like any computer system, these have evolved over time and the intricacies of their use is not always approachable to newcomers.
The resources we have to maintain these projects are not limitless and so we strive to use the resources we have to both keep things in operation and improve their design and operational characteristics to reduce the ongoing maintenance requirements.
We’re launching two new programs to build a higher bandwidth interface between the Gazebo and ROS community and the Infrastructure team.
The first, are ROS Infrastructure Community Reviewers:
These are members of the community who have demonstrated interest in improving the overall status of ROS infrastructure and tooling by actively participating in discussions, issues, and pull requests on various infrastructure projects and related documentation.
The community reviewers will help the Infrastructure and development teams with issue triage, pull request reviews, and escalating specific questions or issues, as well as contributions which require attention from the core team.
Since this is a new project, we are going to start with a small team. If you’re interested in becoming a community reviewer, the best way to do so is to review questions on ROS Answers and provide feedback on issues and pull requests in ROS Infrastructure packages on GitHub.
I’m delighted to announce that our first two community reviewers are
- Christophe Bedard (@christophebedard, GitHub/@christophebedard)
- Kenji Brameld (@Kenji_Brameld, GitHub/@ijnek)
I’m already grateful for the time they’ve invested in the community with their contributions to the infrastructure projects thus far and am excited to recognize them and work more closely with them in this new capacity.
Our second initiative is the launch of Infrastructure Community Office Hours.
The Gazebo and ROS communities both have active support communities at Gazebo Answers and ROS Answers respectively and the infrastructure team does our best to be active contributors to those communities. We can’t review every infrastructure-related question but we can allocate some time each month to discussing questions and issues submitted by active members of the community. Office hours are meant to supplement, not replace, the existing community support. So we’re asking that those who come to office hours with questions submit them on either ROS or Gazebo answers as appropriate so that at the end of the discussion we can update the answer there for everyone’s benefit. Specific issues can also be brought to office hours so that intricate nuances can be discussed interactively with the community before updating the issue with the results of the discussion.
The first office hours session will be held 2022-06-27T15:30:00Z.
The week before the first event, we’ll post a new discourse thread with information about how to join live and collect questions and issue links to discuss live.
We are planning to record these events and make the recordings available to the community but we may not publish the first couple while we find our footing.
We hope that both of these efforts improve the overall quality of infrastructure projects and the community’s participation of them. We’ll iterate on these plans as needed to accomplish that.