ROS PMC Minutes for October 06, 2026

[ahcorde]

The ROS PMC meeting for this week was on Tuesday, October 6, 2026. The notes from the meeting are available at ROS PMC weekly meeting agenda.

ROS PMC Business

• @ahcorde takes over the ROS Project Leader role for the coming year, following @mjcarroll’s interim term.
• @skye.galaxy Nominated as the ROS representative to the TGC. An offline vote will follow; @ahcorde will send it out.
• @christophebedard The group supported @christophebedard as ROSboss for M-turtle, with a formal decision to follow.

Regular Business

Buildfarm update

The buildfarm builds and tests ROS packages across all supported distributions and platforms. This section covers new issues, current priorities, and infrastructure changes that affect maintainers.

• New greenness report: overall greenness keeps going up, with a slight drop in the GUI metrics.
• Issues: nothing new from the buildfarm side.
• The Windows failures on Jazzy and Humble come from Windows 10 no longer being supported. CI is now skipped for Jazzy and Humble on Windows.
  • @clalancette will fix the current Humble buildfarm error, or open a PR for it, on Oct 6, 2026.
  • @mjcarroll will announce the end of Windows 10 support on Discourse.
• Buildfarm Issues Dashboard

Waffle note-taker

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.

• Baffle maker
• Oct 1, 2026 - @skye.galaxy
• Oct 8, 2026 - Andrew

Rosdistro assignments

Rosdistro is a weekly assignment to monitor incoming issues and pull requests in GitHub - ros/rosdistro. Two people per week are assigned to be the rosdistro maintainers.

• Oct 6, 2026 - Oct 13, 2026 - @sloretz and @christophebedard

Release Management

Release Management tracks the status of upcoming releases, patches, and syncs across the active ROS distributions.

• @christophebedard (Humble)
  • New packages and patch release on 2026-09-14.
• @yadunund (Rolling)
  • The automatic Rolling syncs are waiting on feedback from the infrastructure team about the test farm.
    • ros_buildfarm#1151
    • ros_buildfarm_config#396
  • @yadunund will check with @cottsay on testing status and what is left.
• Marco (Jazzy)
  • Synced 2026-09-11 (180 new packages, 698 updates).
• @cottsay (Kilted)
  • Synced 2026-09-17 (16 new packages, 235 updates).
  • Kilted goes EOL in November 2026. The EOL announcement and final sync need planning.
• Shane (Lyrical)
  • Lyrical sync went out Monday, Oct 5, 2026, after regressions in a visualization tool were resolved.

Working Group Updates

• ROS Office Hours
  • Next Meeting: Oct 9, 2026
  • Two proposals from Sep 15 still need an owner:
    • Joint ROS and Gazebo office hours
    • An APAC-friendly slot, roughly 7pm Pacific
  • @ahcorde will attend the Gazebo office hours to see how the session runs.
• Client Library Working Group
  • Last Meeting: Oct 2, 2026
• Accelerated Memory Transport Working Group (@ahcorde)
  • Last Meeting: Sep 30, 2026
  • The Qualcomm buffer backend still needs hardware validation.
• ROSGraph Working Group
  • Last Meeting: Sep 29, 2026
  • NoDL v2 feature set, following the ROSCon talk.
  • Discussing absorbing generate_parameter_library, which is currently being tried out as a case study in larger projects.
• SIG Physical AI (@yadunund)
  • Last Meeting: Sep 29, 2026
  • 8 new members after ROSCon, 59 registered members in total.
  • ROSCon BoF decision: the third reference application will be a dual-arm mobile base.
  • Funding and industry support for the reference application are being discussed.
  • Plan to fold several working groups into a single team that builds reference application 3.

Agenda

• [@ahcorde] libstatistics_collector has been removed from Rolling (by @jmachowinski). Is anyone working on a functional replacement?
  • Emerson proposed a pluggable, tracing-based LD_PRELOAD solution for topic statistics across platforms, and will coordinate it through a meta ticket ([LINK]).
  • @mjcarroll: the tracing-based approach only works on Linux for now.
  • Tracy is an option for tracing on Windows.
  • @clalancette agreed the design has to stay pluggable, so other Windows tracing implementations can be used.
  • @jmachowinski will post on Discourse that libstatistics_collector is removed on Rolling.
• ROSCon feedback
  • Distribution upgrades and packaging
    • proposed using AI tooling to make upgrades between ROS distributions faster and easier.
    • @mjcarroll: Ubuntu versions locked on hardware boards severely limit users’ upgrade paths.
    • @KimMcG is looking into Pixi and conda packaging to broaden cross-platform support.
    • relying on Pixi grows the OS support matrix and the traffic we serve.
  • Data logging and training formats
    • @clalancette: data volume is a bottleneck. Training data needs a columnar, optimized format.
    • SIG Physical AI is working on synchronization and export standards for training data.
  • Executors and the shared buffer backend
    • @skye.galaxy highlighted how well the new shared buffer backend and the latest executor perform.
    • the legacy executors cannot be deprecated until the unbounded queue and overrun issues are fixed.
    • The docs should clearly say which executor is the latest one and how to use it.