Dear meta-ros users and developers,
Two years ago, on January 24th 2013, I published the very first commits of meta-ros on github, and announced it on the related mailing lists [1, 2]. Since then, we have collected close to 900 commits from 15 contributors and we reached the state that meta-ros now provides recipes for over 200 ROS packages. To celebrate this second year anniversary appropriately, I would like to prepare a new release of meta-ros (version 0.2.0). Before releasing version 0.2, I would like to: - address the issue #291 [3]---I believe Kristof has almost solved the issue, and I'll continue on that state. - tag the current state with v0.2rc1, v0.2rc2 and so on until the development stabilized (which I expect to happen quite quickly). - build all recipes of the latest release candidate with the current master of OpenEmbedded-Core and Yocto Project 1.7.1 - Dizzy. - test at least the core-image-ros-roscore and the chatter program on the various qemu machines. - update the installation instructions [4] on the ROS wiki. I hope to achieve this all within the next two weeks or so, as my calendar still has a few free slots to work on meta-ros. Of course, everyone is welcome to test the release candidates on the hardware board you have available and write which boards they tested. I collect the list of boards and add all those boards to the release notes (with credits for the tester). You can also build all recipes with other Poky releases or OpenEmbedded distributions, e.g., Angstrom, and report your build configuration here. After releasing version 0.2 for the ROS Hydro distribution, we will need to address which ROS distribution(s) we would like to support in the future. Currently, I keep the recipes' versions in sync with the versions given in the distribution.yaml of ROS Hydro [5]. In a personal branch [6], I have already experimented with an update of all recipes to the Indigo distribution, and I have not encountered any issues so far. >From my side, I would like to only support one ROS distribution to keep the maintenance effort low, and I would prefer to move forward to the Indigo distribution after version 0.2. However, if there is strong support to stay at the Hydro release or to maintain two branches for the two distributions, we could also consider those options. So what's your opinion on this matter? [1] https://lists.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/yocto/2013-January/011743.html [2] http://lists.ros.org/lurker/message/20130124.053434.1b596fe7.de.html [3] https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros/issues/291 [4] http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installation/OpenEmbedded [5] https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/hydro/distribution.yaml [6] https://github.com/bulwahn/meta-ros/tree/indigo-devel Lukas
