Meta-ros BoF at ROSCon2022

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We held a meta-ros BoF during ROSCon 2022 and managed to make some progress and get community consensus among the interested parties. This post summarizes that discussion and attempts to push things forward.

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Context

meta-ros packs together Yocto/OpenEmbedded layers for ROS 1 and ROS 2. Rationale is that instead of relying on common development-oriented Linux distros (such as Debian or Ubuntu), Yocto allows you to build a customized Linux system for your use case. This helps provide additional capabilities at the OS-level, including security and real-time.

Many companies looking to use ROS in production-grade robotic systems rely on meta-ros however there’re very few contributing back actively (read more about the relevance of meta-ros here).

Summary of the discussion:

  • Overall lack of awareness about Yocto in the ROS community (discussion about why hinted various reasons including performance improvements, security or real-time needs, among others).
  • Debian-based distros (including Ubuntu) remain the most demanded ones by the general ROS and ROS 2 public. Open Robotics has no current plans to extend the buildfarm to produce Yocto/OE binaries.
    • future extensions of tooling may create recipes automatically within the release packages that Open Robotics mantains. This however is a not a group/community ask since Yocto builds are often tied to a particular vendor/use case and require relevant engineering to meet requirements.
  • superflore doing a good job at generating recipes however producing a new release requires a significant engineering effort to polish all recipes so that builds happen without too many hurdles (see effort at ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill - honister branch by vmayoral · Pull Request #1003 · ros/meta-ros · GitHub).
  • Maintaining recipes is currently a community effort. No individual group/company has commited to take over this at the moment.
  • Pending PRs that need to move forward:
  • Future work to be evaluated:
  • There’re currently no active maintainers in the meta-ros package with privileges. We need to unblock this situation. The ROS infrastructure team could help.
  • There’s currently no funded secured nor commitment for enabling future ROS 2 releases. The group however agrees that I’d be nice to maintain at least ROS 2 LTS releases (for now, Humble).

Action items

  • Push notes of the meeting to discourse
  • Ask for additional community input/feedback (please share your views below)
  • Address the lack of active maintainers and give privileges to individuals who committed to address existing work. Namely:
    • Víctor Mayoral-Vilches (GitHub: vmayoral)
    • Andrei Kholodnyi (GitHub: razr)