ROS 2 Iron Irwini Testing and Tutorial Party Instructions

Katherine_Scott · 2023-05-03T18:43:23.994Z

Iron Irwini Testing & Tutorial Kickoff Party / Instructions

Hi Everyone,

As mentioned previously, we’re conducting a testing and tutorial party for next ROS release, Iron Irwini. If you happened to miss the kickoff of the Iron Irwini Testing and Tutorial party (video) this morning I have put together some written instructions that should let everyone, no matter their time zone, participate.

TL;DR

We need your help to test the next ROS Distro before its release on 5/23/2023. We’re asking the community to pick a particular system setup, that is to say a combination of host operating system, CPU architecture, RMW vendor, and build type (source, debian, binary), and run through a set of ROS tutorials to make sure everything is working smoothly. Depending on the outcome of your tutorials you can either close the ticket or report the errors you found. If you can’t assign the ticket to yourself leave a comment and an admin will take care of it for you. Please do not sign up for more than one ticket at any given time. Everything you need to know about this process to know can be found in this Github repository. Tutorials and installation instructions can be found here, and binaries can be found here.

As a thank you for your help we’re planning to provide the top ten people who contribute to the testing repo with ROS Iron swag. To be eligible to receive swag you must register using this short Google Form so we can match e-mail addresses to Github user names and count the total tickets closed. We can’t give swag to everyone at the Tutorial Party, but we do have ten swag packs to give away to those who perform the most tests. The testing and tutorial party will close on 2023-05-19T07:00:00Z, but we’re asking everyone to get started right away!

Full Instructions

We’re planning to release ROS 2 Iron Irwini on 2023-05-23T07:00:00Z, it is one of our biggest releases yet, and we need the community’s help to make sure that we’ve thoroughly tested the distro on a variety of platforms before we make the final release. What do we mean by testing? We’ll, lots of things, but in the context of the testing and tutorial party we are talking about the package-level ROS unit tests and anything else you want to test. What do we mean by tutorials? We also want to make sure all our ROS tutorials are in working order before the release.

The difficulty in testing a ROS release is that people have lots of different ways they use ROS, and we can’t possibly test all of those combinations. For the testing and tutorial party we have created what we call, “a setup.” A setup is a combination of:

DDS vendor: FASTDDS, CYCLONEDDS or CONNEXTDDS
BuildType: binary, debian or source
Os: Ubuntu Jammy, Windows and RHEL-9
Chipset: Amd64 or Arm64

If you already have a particular system setup that you work with, we suggest that you roll with that, otherwise feel free to create a new system setup just for testing purposes. If you normally use Windows or RHEL (or binary compatible distributions to RHEL like Rocky Linux / Alma Linux) we would really appreciate your help as we don’t have a ton of internal resources to test these distributions.

Here are the steps for participating in the testing and tutorial party.

First go to the Tutorial Party Github repo and read the README.md .
Figure out your setup!
1. Note your computer’s host operating system (either Ubuntu Jammy, Windows, or RHEL-9)
2. Note your chipset, either AMD64 or ARM64, if you don’t know it is probably AMD64.
3. Note your installed DDS Vendor (this varies by host OS).
4. Figure out how you want to install the ROS Iron Irwini Beta, your options are:
  1. Binaries. Instructions
  2. Debian installation
  3. Source installation
Once you’ve got your “setup” all figured out take a look at the open tickets in the tutorial repo (at the bottom of the page). There should be a set of tickets for your “setup”. Click on the links and review the available tickets.
Pick a single ticket for your setup and use the assignees option to assign it to yourself. If you can’t assign yourself, leave a comment and an admin will assign the ticket to you
Take a look at the ticket and do as it asks in the “Links” section. For example, in this ticket, its links section points you to this tutorial. You should use your new ROS Iron Irwini setup to run through that tutorial.
Once you complete the links section things will either go smoothly or you will run into problems. Please indicate the results using the check boxes in the “Checks” section of your Github issue.
1. If everything goes well, note as such in your ticket’s comment section. We ask that you attach your terminal’s output as a code block or as a gist file. At this point feel free to close the ticket by clicking “close as completed.”
2. If something went poorly, also note it in your ticket’s comment section. Please include a full stack trace or other debug output if possible.
3. Please fill out this short Google form so we can count your contributions and potentially send you some swag. Unfortunately, we can’t give swag away to everyone, but we can provide the top ten ticket closers with giftccodes for TeeSpring. Update: please fill out the Google form for your first issue so we have your contact information.

If you run into issues we recommend you use the Testing Party Repo for those discussions. If you need to have a real time conversation please make use of the #ros-help channel on our official Discord server. The testing and tutorial party wraps up on 2023-05-19T07:00:00Z, but we’re asking everyone to get started early as we will need some lead time to address any bugs.

Happy testing and thanks for all your help! If you have any questions please include them in the comments.

John_D · 2023-05-04T21:08:21.970Z

If we close more than one ticket, should we fill out the google form for each ticket?

Katherine_Scott · 2023-05-04T21:10:42.736Z

Yes. Please fill it out. It will help us keep track. Also, THANKS!

Jinger_Zeng · 2023-05-05T20:58:13.797Z

Sharing in NXP HoverGames community on Hackster.

nirwester · 2023-05-06T17:28:27.129Z

Is there already any “beta” docker image that could be used for testing? During the Humble release I realized that, for some arcane reason, some bugs we more easily reproducible using docker.

SrijaneeBiswas · 2023-05-07T03:49:37.332Z

@Katherine_Scott I wasn’t able to submit multiple responses on the Google form.

clalancette · 2023-05-07T11:14:42.569Z

nirwester:

Is there already any “beta” docker image that could be used for testing? During the Humble release I realized that, for some arcane reason, some bugs we more easily reproducible using docker.

Unfortunately not. Our current Docker build process requires that the binary debian installation be available from the “release” repository, and right now the Iron debians are only available via testing. We could look at changing this, but right now we don’t have the Docker images available.

marguedas · 2023-05-07T15:41:14.395Z

@nirwester some example dockerfiles are available at [TEMP] Iron dockerfiles for testing by mikaelarguedas · Pull Request #673 · osrf/docker_images · GitHub

You will need to build the images yourself though, it can be done by going in the ros/iron/ubuntu/jammy/ folder and running make build

HTH,

nirwester · 2023-05-07T17:08:41.593Z

Thanks @marguedas , I’ll give that a try

Katherine_Scott · 2023-05-08T17:05:33.516Z

hrrrm. I’ll check on that today and get back to you. Google forms has a few hidden setting; I’ll see if I can find the right radio button.

Katherine_Scott · 2023-05-08T18:57:43.065Z

Should be fixed now.

Guruv_global_robots · 2023-05-09T02:03:23.000Z

Good morning team,

Thanks a lot for your patience and welcoming new learners in to ROS2

I am new to ROS and would like to became permanent ROS2 developer because I love ROS which helping lot
and I want use ROS2 in agriculture robots

I have been gone through the testing invitation and found the new version works only on Ubuntu, Windows and RHEL
But my doubt is why not MacOS

Can any one help to get answers

Thank you for your support
With best regards
Venkat

clalancette · 2023-05-09T03:39:08.254Z

Guruv_global_robots:

But my doubt is why not MacOS

We dropped official macOS support in 2021 due to lack of a dedicated maintainer, and frankly, lack of interest in it. We do have a handful of people who find and fix bugs on macOS, so for the most part it still works if you build from source (following the instructions in macOS (source) — ROS 2 Documentation: Rolling documentation).

As always, if you find problems with macOS support, we are happy to review pull requests that fix a bug there.

Katherine_Scott · 2023-05-09T15:24:49.789Z

Hi Everyone!

We were discussing the tutorial party at our weekly ROS meeting. I am happy to announce that the response has been nothing short of amazing. We’ve closed 350 tickets and 113 remain open.

Please keep up the good work!

One update, after consulting with the team, we’ve determined that you should only need to fill out the Google form for your first ticket. The form lets us map your Github handle to your e-mail address. We should be able to count your closed tickets from the repo.

gbiggs · 2023-05-22T03:41:04.998Z

Hi there!

With the ROS Iron Irwini release imminent, I’d like to take this opportunity to give a big THANK YOU! from Open Robotics to all who have contributed to testing the upcoming release and closing tickets over the past few weeks! We’ve had hundreds of tickets closed by a large number of contributors, all of whom have contributed to making this our best ROS 2 release yet.

Those contributors who have been selected to receive ROS Iron swag will be contacted directly in the next few days.