ROS PMC Minutes for August 5, 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:
    • Thanks to @christophebedard for fixing `test_ros2trace.test_trace.TestROS2TraceCLI.test_runtime_disable` is flaky · Issue #192 · ros2/ros2_tracing · GitHub before it hit the nightlies
    • Thanks to @clara for fixing 👩‍🌾 Regression introduced in packaging by enabling `rosbag2_performance_benchmarking` · Issue #2103 · ros2/rosbag2 · GitHub via Add implicit dep from rviz_default_plugins as workaround by cottsay · Pull Request #822 · ros2/ci · GitHub
      • Note from @mjcarroll that long paths on Windows does require administrator access and that we should generally try to avoid strictly needing it.

• 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: @wjwwood

• 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 5 - August 12: @emersonknapp + Dharini
  • Outgoing rosdistro issues:
    • @christophebedard: Build failed in Jenkins due to missing libraries · Issue #47160 · ros/rosdistro · GitHub Question about fetching proprietary libs from a company’s Artifactory instance
      • In general, packages should build without external network access. This is currently not enforced, but the infrastructure team would like to do this in the future.
      • The exception is packages marked with _vendor suffix. This is not a formalized rule, but could be added to REP-144
      • Even still, with vendor packages, the vendored software must be distributed under a permissive license in order to be hosted in the ROS package mirror. Essentially OSRF must have the ability to redistribute these binaries without additional caveats or constraints.
      • Conclusion: In this case, upstream author is intended to just include the library source in their package, so we can defer until that is complete.
    • @christophebedard Add better_launch to rosdistro by ndahn · Pull Request #47200 · ros/rosdistro · GitHub
      • Name review: better_launch
      • Conclusion: No objections!

ROS Bosses

• ROS Humble (@christophebedard)
  • No updates
• ROS Jazzy (@marcogg)
  • Sync and Patch this week (not announced yet)
• ROS Kilted (@cottsay)
  • No updates
• ROS Rolling (@Yadunund)
  • Sync is out (New packages for ROS 2 Rolling Ridley 2025-08-03)

Agenda Items

• [@christophebedard] - * can/should we backport this to Kilted/Jazzy? Add runtime tracing opt-out mechanism by hidmic · Pull Request #185 · ros2/ros2_tracing · GitHub
  • It changes the LTTng tracepoint provider to be (optionally) dlopen’ed separately by libtracetools.so as opposed to directly included in libtracetools.so
  • I personally consider this more of a new feature than a bugfix (even though it originates from a bug report). I think it’s fairly contained to tracetools, but it is more complex than a simple new API
  • Conclusion: If it’s not breaking ABI/API, then it’s ultimately up to the maintainer to decide if they want to backport or not. In this case, seems reasonable to do so, though there are some questions about if this is technically an impact on ABI with moving (non-public) symbols behind a dlopen call.
• [@tomoyafujita + @invinciblermc] - ros2doctor enhancement: lists ROS and RMW env variable.
  • [ros2doctor] Environment Report by InvincibleRMC · Pull Request #1045 · ros2/ros2cli · GitHub
  • Should be central storage for all the environmental variables? my question is that how we can manage, maintain and collect those list not only for ros2 doctor enhancement but also for general environmental variables in ROS 2. those environmental variables are being removed and added as ROS 2 being developed, i think it would be useful to have dynamic method (APIs) to collect the available environmental variables, and the ros2 doctor can check the user configuration.
  • Conclusion: Seems like a useful addition, should also include tracing environment variables, long term plan to move this to rcl/rcutils/rmw also makes sense, but this is fine in the interim.
• [@nuclearsandwich] - ci.ros2.org has been adversely affected by an increase in crawling/scraping.
  • There has been downtime/unresponsiveness over the weekend and into Monday
  • The infra team is exploring possible options to rate limit and cache at the reverse proxy layer
  • For more discussion, please join the infra meeting on Monday. Goal is to ensure that CI remains useful and usable by the ROS PMC.

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.