This month marks the end of the support window for ROS 2 Dashing Diademata. Over the past week I’ve been reviewing the patch release project board and plucking a final few backports to make while also removing items that would cause unnecessary churn during the final release cycle.
I’m making the final releases into Dashing from that project board this week and next week we’ll hold all Dashing releases unless they resolve a documented issue or build farm regression.
As with other final LTS releases, if you’re still using ROS 2 Dashing I’d highly recommend that you run your applications against the ROS 2 testing repository since the packages there will be Dashing’s final state.
The earliest I expect to run the final sync is 2021-06-01T07:00:00Z which gives everyone a full week for testing and logging issues. No changes to Dashing will be accepted after this sync is complete.
Thanks everyone who has contributed to ROS 2 Dashing and everyone who has supported it as the first LTS release of ROS 2.
Looking at the current state of Dashing there are currently regressions in realsense_ros2_camera and hls_lfcd_lds_driver, the latter of which is blocking several turtlebot3 packages. It appears that there is work in progress to resolve the hls_lfcd_lds_driver and I am troubleshooting the realsense_ros2_camera issue. We’re not currently ready for this final sync but as soon as we’ve addressed these two issues we’ll sync.
No further Dashing releases will be accepted unless they fix an issue that is reported here.
For everyone using Dashing (with the exception of those doing so with the regressed packages) now is the time to try Dashing from the ROS 2 testing repository because what’s in there will soon be the final release of Dashing.
After discussion with upstream I’ve decided that the best resolution for the regressions in librealsense2 is to revert to the prior release and have done so in ros/rosdistro#29820.
I want to acknowledge and express my personal gratitude for the work @doronhi has done to improve the RealSense on ROS release process and for being so responsive as we work through the end-of-support process for first Kinetic and now Dashing. Thank you!
Dashing is now regression free and I’m performing the final audits and pruning the distribution.yaml which will be tagged as the final Dashing sync. I will more than likely build the patch release artifacts this evening and perform the sync at the same time or early tomorrow.