Perception SiG Maintainers Still Maintaining?

This SiG seems like it hasn’t seen any real conversation for a while and the GitHub group definitely needs some love (almost 100 pull requests are dead or un-reviewed across multiple repos). Is anyone still out there? Do we need to recruit some new maintainers?

No offense intended to any maintainers out there - everyone gets busy and priorities change. However, this is a pretty important group of repos for the entire community and I want to make sure they’re taken care of regularly.

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We’ve started work on some of the ROS2 ports, so there is some activity on that side, but I haven’t taken on any sort of maintainership for the ROS1 bits yet.

Are you the only maintainer in the group? If so, I can offer my help with maintenance.

@JWhitleyWork what is the perception sig project? I could not find such project in github. would you please help to share the project link? thanks.

we are contributing on ros2 perception porting, and tracking the status in the thread here: ROS2 perception porting status

@yechun - I’m specifically talking about the ROS Perception Special Interest Group (formerly at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ros-sig-perception). The focus of this group appears to have been developing/maintaining the drivers/nodes at https://github.com/ros-perception. However, as I said, there are many repos there in need of attention.

I have some deep familiarity with slam/open karto & gmapping as well as SBA that I would be more than happy to jump on and help maintain if help are needed in those areas.

@rtoris, @Vincent_Rabaud, @Paul_Bovbel, and Ken Torris appear to be the previous or current maintainers of the packages that need issues and PRs reviewed. Not trying to shame anyone, just want to get some visibility and, hopefully, responses from the current maintainers to see what can be done. The focus of this tread is on the maintenance of packages like image_pipeline and usb_cam which are used by many, many individuals and organizations today, though I am having a specific problem with image_pipeline on 18.04.

@tfoote - Is there any way to get this run up the flagpole and get some visibility to have new maintainers handle these packages?

About image_pipeline, we have already taken resources on porting it for ROS2. We also see there are 74 issues and 29 PRs have no updates for a long time. Don’t know if currently maintainers and OSRF have any plans for maintaining? If you could approve, we would like to be the new maintainer of this package.

@tfoote / @esteve / @dirk-thomas - Can anyone help? There are bugs in image_pipeline that are currently breaking important nodes like image_view for Melodic (see https://github.com/ros-perception/image_pipeline/pull/343) and I can’t get any response from anyone on this issue.

image_view have quite severe problem in Melodic.
image_view does not work with this PR but still waiting for review.
I need maintainers to solve this problem.

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I tried contacting Vincent Rabaud a couple of days ago at every email I could find for him (the listed maintainer for image_pipeline) and got no response. The current people listed as members of ROS Perception are:

I’m hoping one of these people have access to help us out by assigning myself or @smac as a maintainer.

I’m only a maintainer on a small subset of ros-perception. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t spend as much time on maintenance as I’d like, but I try to handle any critical/severe issues quickly.

I think you had the right idea here that someone from Open Robotics needs to make a call and designate a package orphaned and transfer maintainership either to an interested party or to the http://wiki.ros.org/OrphanedPackage taskforce.

The timeline for contacting a maintainer directly is probably more than a few days though.

Yeah definitely more than a few days is necessary. People may be travelling, on vacation or otherwise out of communication for a few days.

I’d suggest following the basic outline of what Dirk suggested here.

If you are interested in taking over maintenance of a package please

  1. If you’re unable to reach the maintainer and they’re not actively maintaining please post an issue on the repository as a proposal to take over. This post should explain why you think you’re an appropriate candidate for maintaining the package so that the community knows who you are. This is also a place for public feedback and others to potentially see that there’s an issue and step up as well.
  2. If there’s a consensus from that thread in the tracker and the issue can be resolved locally that’s great.
  3. If no-one on that thread has access to the repository and the consensus is for a new maintainer to take over please start a thread in the ROS Discourse Release Category requesting for facilitation of the adoption.
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@tfoote - Thanks for the feedback. I agree that giving it more than a few days makes sense. However, the PR fixing the particular bug that caused me to bring this up has been open since June and is causing image_viewer on Melodic to be unusable. I attempted to contact anyone in the group via their Google Group (see link above), via this topic, and now via email. I’ll give it a few more days and then create an issue on the repo. I think the “unable to reach the maintainer” step has passed.

I would add to that, that it is worth linking to your issue from Discourse. Not everyone who is potentially interested will be watching the issue tracker, so I think that you would catch more interested people by also announcing on Discourse. Discussion should still occur on the issue, though. So perhaps close your thread as soon as you make the announcement to prevent splitting the discussion?

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Regardless of current maintainership status’, I’ll throw it out there that I’m open and willing to help maintain anything SLAM/PCL related in ros-perception organization. At this point I’ve read just about everything at one time or another and reimplemented sections of them. Always looking for concrete ways to continue to help support the community.
~Steve Macenski / Simbe Robotics

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@smac and I have taken over maintainership for the image_pipeline repository. Thanks to all involved for helping resolve this.