Preparing for Crystal sync and patch release: 2019-02-14

Packaging and Release Management Crystal
1

The next patch release for Crystal is scheduled for next Thursday (2019-02-14). As with the previous patch release, there is a tracking issue: ros2/ros2#647.

For contributors to Crystal: More packages are starting to switch Crystal development to crystal branches as the mainline branches prepare to target the upcoming Dashing release. If you’re contributing to packages that have branched for Crystal, please target your pull request against the default branch and mention that you would like a Crystal backport once the pull request completes review and acceptance.

We expect releases of the core packages to take place Thursday and Friday this week so that packages will be come in on the ros2-testing repository over the weekend and give folks a chance to test. On Tuesday (2019-02-12) I’ll start holding new Crystal releases in preparation for the sync and barring regressions that sync will happen on Thursday.

2

The current release candidate packages are in the testing repository for ROS 2 Crystal patch 2 (although the linked status page is for AMD64, ARM64 debs are also available). The release and sync will happen on Thursday barring any regressions.

I haven’t created pre-release binaries for Windows or Mac due to the time it takes to upload them to GitHub, but if someone commits to testing a binary artifact on either of those platforms and reporting back I’ll start a pre-release packaging job for the requested platforms on our CI farm.

In the meantime, rosinstall_generator can be used to create source workspaces of the patch release candidate or you can get a repos file from this pull request.