As you may remember, back at the end of July we sent out a survey to get a better idea of how the community is using ROS 2 on Windows: Feedback Requested: Future of ROS 2 Windows Support
104 people responded to that survey, which was many more than we were expecting. Thank you for that! Given the number of people who responded, there is clearly interest in having ROS 2 continue to work on Windows.
We’ve put together a presentation showing a subset of the results in: 2024 ROS 2 Windows survey results - Google Slides
Based on the information we received, here is a proposed plan:
- We will stop shipping the Windows Debug binary archives. They are infrequently used, and eat up a lot of disk space and bandwidth. Note that we will continue to test Windows Debug in CI, as that finds bugs, but we won’t be shipping it to end-users anymore.
- We will mark Ubuntu 24.04 on WSL2 on Windows as a Tier-3 supported platform in REP-2000. A Tier-3 supported designation means that it is community supported, and the core team won’t be adding additional CI for it (at least for now). But putting it in REP-2000 recognizes it as a common platform people are using.
- We will invest some more time into producing Windows native libraries. In particular, we will switch to MSVC 2022 and Windows 11 (hopefully for Kilted). We’ll also switch to using Conda as the preferred solution to install our dependencies (rather than our current hodge-podge of dependency installation). This does not mean that ROS packages will be available in Conda by default; the RobotStack team is handling that for now. But it does mean that installation of the ROS 2 core on Windows should get significantly easier.
We’d like to hear your input on the above proposal, and anything else you’d like to share with us about ROS 2 on Windows. Thanks!