Track request: turtlebot3c-bringup noetic / humble

store-requests
1

Hello,

Could I get a noetic and humble track for turtlebot3c-bringup?

The turtlebot3c-bringup snap automatically spawn the core components for the Turtlebot3 robot. The snap was firstly developed with ROS noetic, and now we plan to publish the ROS 2 Humble version (name of the corresponding ROS DISTRO).

Let me know if any other info is required, Thanks in advance, Giuseppe

2

Hello,

Per Process for aliases, auto-connections and tracks, we need a 1-week voting/discussion period, so I’ll check back on the discussion and votes in a few days. I have three questions before casting my vote.

  1. What’s turtlebot3c-bringup’s release cadence, how often is a new major version (potentially requiring a new track) released? is this documented somewhere by upstream?
  2. Is there some commitment from upstream on maintenance of old versions? e.g. Is humble still supported with security updates? Will it continue to be supported now that noetic is out, and for how long?
  3. Are new versions backwards-incompatible? Meaning, if I was running humble and try to install noetic, will that just work, or do I need to migrate my data/configuration, or will things break horribly?

Thanks,

Emma

3

Hello,

Thanks for the prompt reply. For a bit of context, we currently have the turtlebot3c-bringup snap released in latest. That snap uses core20 which corresponds to the ROS 1 Noetic version of the software. We are now migrating that snap to ROS 2 Humble version which is newer and runs on core22. The names of the tracks are chosen as such in order to follow the ROS releases, which is tied to the coreN number https://docs.ros.org/en/jazzy/Releases.html. Hence, in order to improve clarity for the user installing the snap we are requesting both noetic and humble tracks.

To answer the questions:

  1. The upstream release of a new version of the turtlebot3c-bringup has historically followed cadence of every year, with an LTS every two years, which corresponds to ROS releases. However, there is no documented commitment from upstream that this process will continue in the future. In our case, we released snap only for noetic and humble, and other tracks might be released with cadence of every two years (only on ROS LTS releases), when a new version is provided upstream. We don’t plan to release non-LTS versions.

  2. There is no commitment from upstream to maintain old versions. The code is maintained until a ROS distro goes end of life. The ROS distro lifecycle lasts 5 years for LTS distribution and once a ROS distro goes EOL, the associated snap track will be removed. Noetic will go EOL in 2025, while Humble in 2027. Based on that, each track is expected to have a lifetime of 5 years (until the ROS distro goes EOL), and a new track will be created every two years (ROS LTS and given that upstream creates it).

  3. Yes, the versions are backwards-incompatible. Each new ROS release usually introduces breaking changes with the previous versions. In this case, the two tracks refer to two different ROS versions as well, so the snap/robot must be configured accordingly.

Thanks, Giuseppe

4

Hi Giuseppe,

Thank you for the reasoning! +1 to adding these tracks.

I have created the tracks noetic and humble for you for this snap. Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

Emma

5

Hello,

Could we also add the jazzy track for the turtlebot-bringup snap?

Thanks in advance, Giuseppe

6

Hello,

I’ve added the jazzy track for snap turtlebot3c-bringup.

Emma