RFC: REP-2004 Package Quality Categories

General
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I’d like to share with everyone a REP that we’ve been working on which aims to improve the quality of our core packages, and encourage package maintainers to take a more active role in documenting the processes and practices which affect the quality of their packages.

tl;dr I encourage you all to have a look at our REP pull request here:

And leave any comments you have on that pull request. We would very much appreciate your feedback and we’ll do our best to respond to everyone and incorporate as much feedback as possible.

I would like to initiate a vote on the REP as well, following the advice in REP-0010:

https://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0010.html

You may do that here or on the pull request.

We’ll be using this primarily in our core ROS 2 packages at first, but we hope it come to be used by the rest of the community in ROS 2 and ROS 1 and perhaps as a reference beyond our projects.

Part of the REP calls for packages to declare their quality level and justify it, in what we’re calling a “quality declaration” document. We’ve already drafted a few of these if you want to see how it might be used in practice. Feel free to add your feedback on those as well. For example:

The REP also calls for a peer reviewed list of packages at each quality level. We’ve decided we’ll do this as an “Informational REP” which we continually update, similar to REP-2000, see REP-0001:

https://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0001.html#rep-types

We’ll do this after we have some experience with this REP under our belts. Most likely some time after the upcoming Foxy release.

Also, this isn’t the first time this was mentioned, but I wanted to start a new thread for the purposes of voting and stuff like that. But for completion @gavanderhoorn mentioned here:

Thanks for your diligence :slight_smile:

We’ve had contributions on this REP so far from several TSC member organizations, the Security and Quality Assurance working groups, and several individual contributors. I wanted to thank them for their time and input so far. <3

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I’d like to ask again for people to go and give feedback and/or vote for the REP. Thanks!

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For those that were interested in this REP originally, please consider reviewing this change to the motivation described in the REP:

We’re doing this to clarify some questions that have come up a few times in discussions about the REP, but the main content and purpose of the REP has not changed.

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