Roles and Responsibilities ofMaintainers
Tully Foote

ROSCon May 12th 2013

Outline123

Explain Package Maintainership
Purpose of a Maintainer
Role of a Maintainer
What being a maintainer requires
Call for Maintainers
Maitainer Status Page
Bonus: ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 20132 / 21

Purpose of a Maintainer• Provide a package for use by the community.
• Provide a point of contact for the community tokeep track of the state of the package.

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of MaintainersROSCon May 12th 20133 / 21Role of a Maintainer
Take code released by someone else and package it using
Bloom. Specifically:• Create a git-buildpackage style repository.
• Import the upstream code (from source control,tarball, etc)
• Create the release tags
• Submit a pull request to update the indexed version

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 2013

4 / 21Role of a Maintainer• Review pull requests and merge them if they areappropriate and pass unit tests..
• Provide responses in the bug tracker even if it’s justto say, there’s not developer time for this right now.
• It is not doing major development, and they should
feel fine to push back any patch which is not up to
their standard for the submitter to update.

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 2013

5 / 21

What being a maintainer requires
Skills:• Being able to operate a bug tracker• Merging the occational pull pull request (moregenerically merge patches)• Releasing package with bloom. (See bloomtutorials)

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 20136 / 21

Outline123Explain Package Maintainership
Purpose of a Maintainer
Role of a Maintainer
What being a maintainer requires
Call for Maintainers
Maitainer Status Page
Bonus: ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 20137 / 21

Call for Maintainers
Please consider being a maintainer.
• Ensure that packages you rely on are available.
• Become a contributing member of the community.
• It’s not a large commitment.
• Can commit for just one distribution• Time requirements:• A couple of hours to release for each version of ROS.
• 10-15 minutes a week to respond to issue trackers andreview patches.

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 20138 / 21

Status Page
http://ros.org/debbuld/groovy.html

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 20139 / 21

Current Status
Statistics:• groovy declared status:••••

31 maintained
6 developed
5 end-of-life
coverage 25%• hydro declared status:• 64 maintained• 4 developed• 1 end-of-life• coverage 45%

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201310 / 21

Outline
123Explain Package Maintainership
Purpose of a Maintainer
Role of a Maintainer
What being a maintainer requires
Call for Maintainers
Maitainer Status Page
Bonus: ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201311 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201312 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201313 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201314 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201315 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201316 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201317 / 21

ROS Version Survey Results

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201318 / 21

Discussion Starter

From these results it seems pretty clear that thecommunity would prefer:• Change to 12 month release cycle• Support releases for 24 months

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201319 / 21

Open questions• How long to keep Hydro in Beta?
• How to intermesh with Ubuntu release cycle?
• Do we provide a backports/unstable repository?
• Do we split repositories into main and universe?

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201320 / 21

Questions

Questions?
This presentation will be ported to thewiki and posted at:
http://www.ros.org/wiki/
MaintenanceGuide

Tully Foote (OSRF)

Roles and Responsibilities of Maintainers

ROSCon May 12th 201321 / 21