ROS PMC Minutes for August 12, 2025

[mjcarroll]

The ROS PMC meeting for this week was on Tuesday. The notes from the meeting are available at ROS PMC weekly meeting agenda

PMC Business

• No formal business

Ongoing Tasks

• Buildfarm:

  • Buildfarm issues triage sheet
  • Buildfarm greenness report
  • Issues:
    • Regression introduced in packaging by enabling rosbag2_performance_benchmarking still affecting RHEL
      • @mjcarroll to profile rviz_default_plugins build to attempt to reduce memory demands
      • @cottsay to artifically inject dependency to ensure that rosbag2_performance_benchmarking and rviz_default_plugins don’t run simultaneously
    • [image_transport] Nightly test failure with rmw_zenoh due to SystemDefaultsQoS assumptions (Reported by Yadu) - Similar to a failure in pointcloud_transport, there is a mismatch in test expectations that needs to be addressed

• Waffle assignments:

  • Waffle is a weekly meeting where maintainers triage incoming issues and pull requests that haven’t been otherwise acted upon. One person per week is assigned to be the “waffle note-taker” to both take notes in the meeting to keep the meeting as efficient as possible.
  • July 31 + August 7: @MichaelOrlov

• Rosdistro Assignments

  • Rosdistro is a weekly assignment to monitor incoming issues and pull requests in GitHub - ros/rosdistro: This repo maintains a lists of repositories for each ROS distribution. Two people per week are assigned to be the rosdistro maintainers.
  • August 12 - August 19: @nuclearsandwich + @mjcarroll
  • Outgoing rosdistro issues:
    • [@emersonknapp] Add pip version of docker package by bastianschildknecht · Pull Request #46946 · ros/rosdistro · GitHub
      • We shouldn’t be adding -pip packages that can conflict with system installed apt packages.
      • [@nuclearsandwich] The best way way to accopmlish this is to supplement your rosdep sources
      • [@cottsay] We should also add a check to the rosdistro reviewer bot: Flag pip rules when there is already a system package rule · Issue #48 · ros-infrastructure/rosdistro-reviewer · GitHub
    • [@emersonknapp] Series of 403 errors in rosdistro builds related to the openembedded package index.
      • [@cottsay] This check has been disabled, as we are getting throttled, but unclear from where (perhaps cloudflare?). Already looped in openembedded folks
    • [@mjcarroll] add 'open3d' to rolling by christian-rauch · Pull Request #47284 · ros/rosdistro · GitHub - should this have the _vendor suffix?
      • [@MichaelOrlov] Internally, we call things vendor even if it’s being unconditionally built from upstream sources
      • [@cottsay] This dependency, specifically, will be available in plucky, and there are talks of it being included in Fedora. We want to be sure not to conflict with those dependencies
      • [@mjcarroll] I think the distinction here is that the OMPL package, referenced in the PR, actually has a package.xml in the repository, while the open3d package is downloading and injecting a package.xml (a vendored build)

ROS Bosses

• ROS Humble (@christophebedard/@audrow)
  • Preparing for Humble sync 2025-08-12
• ROS Jazzy (@marcogg)
  • Preparing for Jazzy sync and patch release 2025-08-14
• ROS Kilted (@cottsay)
  • Preparing for Kilted sync 2025-08-13
• ROS Rolling (@Yadunund)
  • No updates

Agenda Items

• [@mjcarroll] Logging is kind of slow, even at levels below the level selected for the node. · Issue #2928 · ros2/rclcpp · GitHub
  • Summary: When logging with the /rosout sink enabled, logging adds a lot of latency versus ROS 1, which is very noticeable when logging in critical sections.
  • [@christophebedard] We do disable /rosout logging by default
  • [@JM_ROS] We do call rcl_publish in the actual logging message, there isn’t any sort of buffering or queuing for log messages.
    • [@wjwwood] This can be further exacerbated by something like rmw_zenoh, which (as far as I remember), doesn’t have a concept of async publishing, so all publish calls are blocking
  • [@wjwwood] The intention here was to rely on the logging framework to do buffering/queuing of log messages, so it may be that the implementation doesn’t match the intention. Logging with /rosout should likely not be blocking
    • [@JM_ROS] If we had a queue/buffer mechanism, it may also make sense to add a LogMessageArray type where the entire buffer could be flushed out in a single publish, rather than a sequence of individual messages.
  • @mjcarroll to check with @tomoyafujita who has recently been thinking about logging.
• [@HemalShahNV] Native rcl::tensor type
  • [@HemalShahNV] presented an overview and motivation for introducing a rcl::tensor type, including why relying purely on type adaption may be insufficient to get the type of zero- or low- copy transport that rcl::tensor would solve
  • [@wjwwood] Proposed that it could also be used in conjunction with a custom typesupport generator. This custom typesupport could help prevent introducing parallel tensor_msgs types, which would maximize compatibility with existing code.
  • Team to read the design doc and provide feedback on discourse topic.

As a reminder, ROS PMC meetings are open to the public, though only committers and members may speak without being called on. If you have topics that you would like discussed, feel free to respond here.

[mjcarroll]

Action Items:

• @emersonknapp can you post the notes/references that you had in relation to doing custom rosdep sources
• @tomoyafujita can you provide feedback on the logging topic discussed above?

Thanks!

[emersonknapp]

Sure thing!

I created this issue to track adding a new tutorial for “custom supplemental rosdep keys”
Add tutorial: How to have supplemental custom rosdep keys, on top of the standard index · Issue #5817 · ros2/ros2_documentation · GitHub
It contains a summary of the target content and links to some references that add more information - a savvy user can probably do it from that alone but I’d like to fill out that tutorial with full step-by-step instructions.

I also posted a detailed note on the rosdistro issue in question, closing it Add pip version of docker package by bastianschildknecht · Pull Request #46946 · ros/rosdistro · GitHub