ROS Melodic Morenia Beta has begun

General
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Dear ROS users,

The beta for Melodic has begun!

Thanks to all of our contributors and maintainers who made this possible.

ros-melodic-desktop-full is available on Ubuntu Bionic (18.04), Ubuntu Artful (17.10), and Debian Stretch. So take a moment to be an upstanding member of the ROS community
and:

  • sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-desktop-full
  • Try testing out packages you regularly use that are available in the beta.
  • Report any bugs you find on the issue tracker for the package (usually available on the packge for a package on wiki.ros.org).
  • Try out documentation, tutorials, and generated documentation and fix issues on the Wiki.
  • If you are a package maintainer, continue releasing packages, fixing issues wherever possible, and checking your package documentation. The Melodic beta is the best time to change API or change the behavior of your code, but don’t forget to update the Migration page if you do:
    http://wiki.ros.org/melodic/Migration
    To know if your package can be released see the blocked_releases status page.

May 23rd, World Turtle Day, is still our official release date for ROS Melodic and we are on track to meet it! So mark it down into your calendar, and if you’re a maintainer, plan to finish your releases before then to leave some breathing room.

Known discrepancy amongst platforms:

  • octovis is not available on armhf as in previous ROS Distributions
    Every other package is available on all architectures/platforms targeted by REP3!

For a more comprehensive view of the current status of Melodic, including packages outside of desktop-full that are available in the beta, see the status pages on repositories.ros.org:

http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/ros_melodic_default.html
http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/ros_melodic_ds.html
http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/ros_melodic_dsv8.html
http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/ros_melodic_ubhf.html
http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/ros_melodic_ubv8.html
http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/compare_lunar_melodic.html

Cheers!

Chris Lalancette
Melodic ROS Boss

5 Likes
2

I know there’s only a week left before World Turtle Day, but what date are you planning to start holding to merge new releases for the official Melodic release?

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For packages that are pretty core to the system, I’m planning on holding after Monday (May 21st). That’s just to ensure that we don’t get a full system rebuild and find some nasty surprise at the last moment. For “leaf” packages (that don’t have a lot of downstream consumers), I’ll consider merging up until Tuesday (May 22nd).

1 Like
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Should the migration guide be in any sort of order? I’m about to start adding notes for the navigation stack, but it seems that the packages aren’t in any reasonable order – should we make them alphabetical to aid users in reading that document?

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I just alphabetized it for you. Thanks for pointing it out. It looks like it was in alphabetical order until urdf and kdl_parser were appended and then rosconsole's changes were prepended.

/shrug :slight_smile:

Anyone else that edits that page, please try to keep it in order.

2 Likes