Kilted Test and Tutorial Party and Release Events 🎉

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Kilted Test and Tutorial Party and Release Events :tada:


KiltedTAndT
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What is a Test and Tutorial Party?

We want Kilted Kaiju to be our best ROS 2 release yet, and to get there we need to make sure that we thoroughly test Kilted before it is released to the general public. We also want to make sure that the ROS documentation on docs.ros.org continues to be clear, concise, and correct. That’s where we need your help! We’re looking for community volunteers to join us for our annual ROS Testing and Tutorial Party. If you are looking to start dipping your toes into ROS development this is a great place to start.

So, what is a testing and tutorial party you may ask? Well, it is a chance for the community to meet and systematically review all of the current ROS tutorials while also testing the latest ROS release. What we attempt to do at the party is to test every ROS tutorial for every “flavor” of ROS user, or in other words, every combination of operating system (Ubuntu Linux, RedHat Linux, Windows, etc.), RMW implementation (FastDDS, Cyclone DDS, etc.), installation method, and CPU architecture (amd64, aarch64, etc.).

Now that we’ve frozen the Kilted release, the core developer team is working on generating a set of “early release” binary and source packages for Kilted Kaiju. We plan to make these pre-release binaries publicly available before the Testing and Tutorial Party. During the party we’ll release our testing repository with a long list of tests we would like to run on the testing version of Kilted Kaiju. These tests will first ask contributors to pick a particular release “setup”, and then run either the test suite or work through one or more of the existing ROS 2 tutorials on docs.ros.org. Each “setup” is a specific combination of RMW vendor (FastDDS/Cyclone DDS/Zenoh), build type (binary tarball/packages/source), host operating system (Ubuntu Noble/RHEL-9/Windows 10), and architecture (amd64/aarch64). For each setup, we would like to perform a number of tests that validate our tutorials, core ROS functionality, and important features. With dozens possible setup configurations, testing each and every one internally just isn’t feasible. To ensure reproducibility of the tests it’s also valuable to get multiple evaluations of each test, which is why we need your help!

Tutorial party participants are asked to perform the tests they sign up for and report back the results. If you happen to find an issue or bug while participating in the tutorial party you’ll need to report it to us so it can get corrected before the Kilted release.

Tutorial Party Information

We are planning to kick-off the Kilted tutorial party off at 2025-05-01T16:00:00Z with a meeting where we explain the whole Testing and Tutorial Party Process. That meeting can be found on the OSRF Official Events Calendar. We’ll record the meeting and post instructions on Discourse for those who can’t make the meeting. To help motivate participants, we will be giving away either OSRA membership or ROS Kilted Kaiju swag to the testers who complete the most tests during the tutorial party. Once you have completed your first test or tutorial, and close the Github issue, you will need to fill out a short Google form so we know how to contact you. We’ll post more details about the tutorial party in about two weeks when we kick things off. For now, we’re outlining a rough sequence of events so everyone can set aside some time to participate.

This year we’re organizing two events to coincide with the Kilted Kaiju release that are worth mentioning. First we’ve scheduled our regular ROS By-The-Bay meetup to coincide with the T&T Party Kickoff. If you are in the Bay Area and want to learn more about the T&T party in person please register for ROS By-The-Bay. Second, and this is still tentative, we’re organizing a ROS Meetup / Kilted Release Party at ICRA. More information about that event should be available in the next two weeks!

Here are the key dates you’ll want to remember:

We have added these events to the OSRF Official Events Calendar, but the big one that you won’t want to miss is the kick-off event on 2025-05-01T16:00:00Z . In the meantime we would like your help spreading the word about the Testing and Tutorial Party. We hope to see you there on May 1st!

Finally, if you would like to help support Open Robotics, and events like these, consider making a donation or joining the OSRA.

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As a user who has been using ROS for projects for 2 years now, but has never contributed to open source or for a testing party like this, how easy/hard is it to be a part of this test and tutorial party?

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Most of the validation tickets shouldn’t be too hard. You just have to go through a given tutorial (read the instructions, run the commands, etc.) or run some commands to test a feature. If you encounter any issues (error, different output, etc.), you just report them under the ticket with some notes regarding what worked and what didn’t work, and ideally submit a PR to fix the docs or code, if needed.

For more information, I encourage you to join the ROS Kilted Kaiju tutorial and testing party - hangout and Q&A virtual event (see above)!

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