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Support Period

As the primary development platform for ROS is Ubuntu our release schedule follow's Ubuntu's release schedule. However ROS does support other platforms and as such the releases of ROS should work on the other platforms for the same periods.

Starting with ROS Indigo Igloo ROS releases are supported according to the following schedule:

Ubuntu LTS supports ROS, ROS+1
LTS+1 supports ROS+1 Beta
LTS+2 supports ROS+1
LTS+3 supports ROS+2 Beta
...
LTS2 supports ROS+2, ROS+3

Next Distribution Release

ROS Indigo Igloo

expected release May, 2014

I-turtle

I-turtle

Current Distribution Releases

Distro

Release date

Poster

Tuturtle, turtle in tutorial

ROS Hydro Medusa
(Recommended)

September 4th, 2013

H-turtle

H-turtle

ROS Groovy Galapagos

December 31, 2012

G-turtle

G-turtle

End of Life (EOL) Distribution Releases

ROS Fuerte Turtle

April 23, 2012

F-turtle

F-turtle

ROS Electric Emys

August 30, 2011

E-turtle

E-turtle

ROS Diamondback

March 2, 2011

D-turtle

D-turtle

ROS C Turtle

August 2, 2010

C-turtle

C-turtle

ROS Box Turtle

March 2, 2010

B-turtle

B-turtle

Details

The details on the distributions is in the rep documentation.

Staging

When making releases they are staged for QA testing. See the Release Staging page for more information.

Timeline

Generic Release Timeline

What is a Distribution?

A set of versioned ROS stacks forms a ROS Distribution. These are akin to Linux distributions (e.g. Ubuntu). We are currently providing a ROS distribution, which contains different variants for different robot platforms. Much like Linux distributions, they make it much easier for developers to target a consistent set of libraries to develop and test on. Also, we are providing patches for distributions so that developers are not forced to switch to bleeding edge, unstable code just to incorporate important bug fixes.

For example, the following stacks could form a ROS Distribution:

Stack maintainers are encouraged to continue pushing their work forward to match the most recent stable ROS release, but this distribution-release system will provide greater stability and fixed integration points. Just like you can upgrade the "host" Linux distribution all at once (e.g., from Ubuntu 08.10 to Ubuntu 09.04), the ROS distribution system lets you work against a stable codebase until you are ready to roll everything forward all at once.

The rosdistro format supports alternate distributions. There are many different types of robots with different needs, and we anticipate that others may put together their own distributions in the future to better target these platforms.


2022-05-28 12:40