Contents
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
expected release May, 2014 |
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Current Distribution Releases
Distro |
Release date |
Poster |
Tuturtle, turtle in tutorial |
ROS Hydro Medusa |
September 4th, 2013 |
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December 31, 2012 |
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End of Life (EOL) Distribution Releases
April 23, 2012 |
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August 30, 2011 |
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March 2, 2011 |
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August 2, 2010 |
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March 2, 2010 |
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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
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:
- the ROS core stack, version 1.0
common_msgs, version 1.0
visualization_msgs, version 1.0
- and so on
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.