With the recent launch of the OSRA, the OSRF is spending some time reorganising and cleaning up the various GitHub organisations and repositories that it manages. This is being done both to streamline the management of the open source projects (particularly permissions management, which is currently mostly manual, and very fragile), and to ensure there is no confusion about what is and what is not managed by the OSRF through the OSRA’s governance processes.
Two such projects that are well-known in our community but are not managed by the OSRF are MoveIt (maintainer: PickNik) and Nav2 (maintainer: Open Navigation).
As part of this clarification, the following changes will happen for each project, implemented over the next few days.
MoveIt
We are moving the MoveIt repositories from ros-planning to a new organisation at GitHub. From now on, the MoveIt repositories will all be hosted at github.com/moveit, where they will be managed by PickNik.
The moveit.ros.org subdomain will soon redirect to the new official MoveIt website at moveit.ai, which will also be managed by PickNik.
We are moving the Nav2 repositories from ros-planning to a new organisation at GitHub. From now on, the Nav2 repositories will all be hosted at github.com/open-navigation, where they will be managed by Open Navigation.
The navigation.ros.org subdomain will soon redirect to the new official Nav2 website, which will also be managed by Open Navigation.
We look forward to working with PickNik and Open Navigation long into the future and seeing them continue to use ROS and their projects to revolutionise robotics applications.
Quick question / clarification: is the intent here that redirects will be permanent (i.e. the URLs will continue to resolve, just the underlying hosts are changing)?
Once Open Navigation takes possession of the Nav2 software and documentation, we’ll figure out a new independent home for it so that we can add external contributors and developers. It won’t live in open-navigation for long.
This seems like a confusing idea, and I don’t quite see the rational for it?
What sort of confusion do you mean? Confusion in a legal/branding sense? Or confusion in a technical sense?
If a branding confusion… What does that have to do with github repo structure? I have never seen IP/Trademark discussions center around how a open source project is structured in Git…
If in a technical sense, looking at the commit activity, there is no confusion (in my mind at least) as to who is currently driving the vast majority of technical effort in this example. Why are we cutting this vital contribution out of the scope of the organization? What plan do we have to replace this effort? @gbiggs
Permissions management is a standard problem for practically any large open source project? Cutting out features seems like an anti-pattern for resolving a fairly minor/common issue (compared to the effort of the actual code)?
Why are we making a fairly large change in “the next few days” without some amount of preparation and community feedback? Can we have some time to discuss this as a community?
Why are we making the change without any of the process as outlined here: How It Works – OSRA Was there meeting minutes that could be reviewed as to the internal rational for this change?
TLDR:
Can we throw the brakes on here and have a discussion as a community about this? My company (and hence financial support) depends on the sane and consistent governance of the larger ROS2 ecosystem, and this sort of fast and not-clearly communicated change worry me.
To be clear, I come at this from the perspective of wanting ROS2 and OSRA to thrive, and have/do put $ where my views are. I just don’t see this sort of change to be in keeping with the governance processes and model that the OSRA was established to uphold. Is there some venue or notes or process that was followed here that could be pointed to / documented in making this change?
EDITS: - Modified language to be more clear/neutral
I understand many in the community have questions. The timeline for this was vastly accelerated beyond what we originally planned due to a GitHub permissions screw-up on my end breaking things for many of the MoveIt team. We are having some more discussions and will post updates here as soon as we can.
For the record, PickNik does not plan on changing anything about how the MoveIt project is run. MoveIt will continue to have first-class ROS support, and all existing maintainers will retain their permissions on the new organization.
If you’re a MoveIt maintainer or contributor and your permissions have been impacted by this move, please reach out to @henning_kayser or me to get your permissions fixed.
So, I’m a bit confused here - the remaining repos in ros-planning organization are basically all ROS 1 stuff (the original nav stack, robot_pose_ekf, etc), which aren’t really managed by OSRF (as far as I can tell, having been a maintainer of the nav stack since 2014, and never having had a conversation about anything navigation related with OSRF folks). How does migrating MoveIt/Nav2 make anything clearer?
Does this also mean that organizations like ros-drivers are going to be effectively dissolved? It’s already hard enough to track down proper ROS 2 driver repositories, and if we start splitting them off into a bunch of different non ros-* organizations, that is going to get even worse…
yes, I would also have expected at least some community involvement as well.
And when the OP was posted, the changes were already (being) made, which seemed to make the whole thing a bit of a fait accompli.
I don’t pay – yet – but would like to see such large, even if just infrastructural, changes be more of a community process. The whole point of the discussion in Growing issue with ROS Documentation (unfortunately merged into that documentation thread) was the limited visibility the community has into what makes the OSRF/OSRA (now) tick and how much effort it all takes.
Out-of-the-blue announcements and actions like this one seem like they’re not helping making that any clearer: there still seems to be some invisible (benevolent) entity taking care of things behind the scenes without, apparently, any need for anyone else to care as many were probably not even aware that what @gbiggs posted was something that needed fixing.
If we want more people to care about the project, should we not give them an opportunity to (not) care, instead of just “hav[ing] some more [internal] discussions and post[ing] updates [when] we can”.
The permissions on MoveIt · GitHub have been restored for admins, maintainers, and core contributors. Please check for the corresponding team invites, or reach out to me in case I missed you. We are now working on updating references to ros-planning and source installs.
Totally agreed with your view, I just wanted to say that just because Polymath Robotics does support the org in some minor way, I wasn’t trying to imply that gives me/us any amount of weight in this.
Re-reading my comment I realized it might come off that way, and it was not my intent
The goal of a community is to involve a wide of a user/contributor base as feasible.
Echoing the sentiment that a bit more discussion would have been nice. A small permissions hiccup isn’t reason to change everything suddenly.
We’ve also got @ezrabrooks talking for MoveIt suddenly. He’s contributed a grand total of 7 commits to MoveIt. Nothing against Ezra but… that shouldn’t happen. It goes against MoveIt Governance | MoveIt.
Decisions are getting more unilateral and $-driven all the time
As a point of clarification, this change was initiated by the OSRA, not PickNik. As Geoff mentioned, a permissions change made in preparation for the migration unfortunately led to a disruption of operations on our end, at which point Geoff accelerated the OSRA’s plans to get us unblocked.
As for why I’m “talking for MoveIt” - the things I’ve said here and elsewhere have been co-written by a number of PickNik employees and MoveIt maintainers, including @henning_kayser, I just happen to be the person who’s posted them. Sorry for any confusion.
No, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about suddenly ignoring the governance and focusing decision-making to a few people. (who may or may not be qualified, but it wasn’t discussed)
Just to clarify, I have restored the permissions and have also taken part in coordinating the migration. For both, MoveIt and Nav2, the migration has been motivated by the independence of both projects from OSRF/OSRA and initiated by a change of ownership in the ros-planning organization. This has also been coordinated with the most active ROS 1 stack maintainers. With the migration we ensure that development and maintenance continues just the way it was, with the same people and permissions (again, please let me know if anyone is missing GitHub team invites). I’m open to discuss this at length in the next maintainer meeting.
The decision on how to move forward was taken in the public monthly MoveIt maintainer meeting last Thursday. Everybody who wants to be actively involved in decision making processes just needs to participate. As Henning said, please bring up your concerns about governance in next month’s maintainer meeting. That would be a more sustainable way to discuss things rather than throwing accusations around in a Discourse thread. This is not a coup and nobody will be left behind
