Hello Gazebo Community,
Based on many discussions with individuals and reading various comments from our community, the Gazebo PMC has decided to change the Gazebo release date to March and to better align Gazebo releases with ROS. For details on the motivation and all of the implications, please read the original proposal.
In short, we believe that releasing in March will alleviate issues we had with releasing in September. These include:
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Better availability of the release team since feature/code freeze is no longer in the summer.
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Allows plenty of time to merge contributions from Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and summer interns.
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The release team will no longer have to manage a code freeze simultaneously with ROSCon submission deadlines.
Releasing in March also makes it easier to align Gazebo releases with ROS. We will now have just a 2 months difference between the latest Gazebo and ROS releases as opposed to 7. To improve alignment with ROS, we’ll also synchronize the version letters. The next release, Gazebo M (skipping K and L), is planned for March 2027 and it will be paired with ROS M, which is slated for May 2027.
Together with this change, the support windows for Gazebo releases will be extended to have the same end-of-life dates as the ROS releases they are paired with. This also applies retroactively to older Gazebo releases. You can find the updated support windows at Gazebo Releases — Gazebo jetty documentation