The ROS PMC meeting for this week was on Tuesday, September 15, 2026. The notes from the meeting are available at ROS PMC weekly meeting agenda.
There will be no PMC meeting next week due to ROSCon. An informal, unofficial gathering may happen on Tuesday for casual conversation about where the project is heading. Nothing formal is planned.
ROS PMC Business
Vote result: RHEL to Tier 1 on Rolling, Fedora to Tier 3. PASSES. The vote closed Friday.
- Documentation has already been updated.
- REP 158 vote in progress. Most ROS PMC votes are in. The Gazebo PMC is also listed on this REP, so @mjcarroll attended their meeting on Monday and put forward a motion for them to vote as well. The Gazebo vote closes Friday.
- Process note worth knowing: across all affected PMCs, quorum is 50% of members, and the outcome is a simple majority of those who vote. In principle 25% of the combined ROS and Gazebo membership could carry an acceptance. That is a lower bar than it first appears.
- On passing, REP 158 moves to Accepted rather than Finalized. The authors then complete the implementation, after which it can be finalized.
- Committer vote going out this afternoon, ahead of ROSCon. No objections were raised to the proposed scopes.
- All committers get access to
ros2_documentationand the ability to run CI. - Timple:
geometry,tf2,launch - Nadav Elkabets:
rclpy - @KimMcG:
ros2/ros2,ci,setup-ros,action-ros-ci - Martin Pecka:
point_cloud_transport, with room to expand over time - @nvcyc:
rosidl_buffer_backends,rosidl*,rmw*, largely formalizing access he already has - Leonardo Rossetti:
ros2/ros2,ros2/ci - Any committer is immediately eligible to be a rosdistro reviewer if they want to be. @cottsay noted it would be good to have more reviewers with Red Hat context.
- The general principle: adding committers should be cheap. It is easy to add them and, as we recently established, considerably easier to remove a committer than a PMC member.
Whatever your GitHub profile picture is on Friday is likely to appear on a slide at ROSCon.
- All committers get access to
- Deferred: the Bazel Working Group, now until after ROSCon. @andrew_symington will use his ROSCon talk to gauge interest, and the charter can be worked out afterward.
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.
Issues
launch_testing_examples.check_msgs_launch_testfails to receive messages on the chatter topic. Consistent, and notably fails on Zenoh and Cyclone but not Fast DDS. @emersonknapp observed that Fast DDS currently has much faster initial topic discovery than the default configurations of the other two, so this may be a discovery timing problem with the test not waiting properly. Assigned to @yadunund.- Windows packaging build regression from
rosbag2_performance_benchmarkinghitting the MSVC object-file section limit. A fix is up but not merged, having failed on what appears to be a flaky runner. The fix is the big object flag. - Flaky async node, service, and client tests timing out after 120 seconds. To be flagged to Nadav Elkabets, who worked on the asyncio executor and found a deadlock while preparing his ROSCon presentation.
test_load_node_with_param_fileintermittently hangs while loading composable nodes. @mjcarroll will take a look.- Flaky
test_tf2.test_message_filter.gtest.missing_resulttimeout on Windows withrmw_zenoh_cpp. First failure within the last 15 days, with logs already aged out. To be picked up by someone with a Windows setup, available later this week. benchmark_executortests consistently timeout on Ubuntu Resolute AMD64. The benchmark ramps iteration count based on sample timing, so a hang partway through is suspicious. @skye.galaxy suspects it is locking up in the multi-threaded executor and never getting past that stage. @jmachowinski noted that on a 20-core machine the multi-threaded test takes a very long time, though a four-core worker should be fine. Worth temporarily raising the timeout to establish whether it is hung or merely slow. @jmachowinski and @skye.galaxy will do a triage pass to characterize the problem, without committing to a fix.
- Priorities
- PTAL Buildfarm Issues Dashboard (27 open issues).
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.
- Sep 17, 2026
- @andrew_symington, back from paternity leave
- Sep 24, 2026
- No Waffle, ROSCon week
@Katherine_Scott made the point that it matters that people show up to Waffle the week after ROSCon, tired as everyone will be, because that is when new attendees are most likely to turn up.
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.
- Sep 15, 2026 - Sep 22, 2026
- HOLD ALL ROSDISTRO PULL REQUESTS.
- We are trying to land three syncs in short order: Kilted, Lyrical, and a fast follow-up on Jazzy for the Zenoh regression. Please do not merge anything to rosdistro through the end of the week unless notified otherwise.
Release Management
Release Management tracks the status of upcoming releases, patches, and syncs across the active ROS distributions.
- @christophebedard (Humble)
- @yadunund (Rolling)
- Deployment to build.ros.org is done and behaving as expected. @cottsay has one remaining tweak to the blocking behavior, since we do not want an automatic sync to testing running while an automatic sync to main is in progress. That has never mattered when a human was driving, but it does once it is automated. @yadunund expects to land it today or tomorrow.
- @marcogg (Jazzy)
- The Jazzy sync is out, but carries a significant Zenoh bug. A fast follow-up sync is requested.
- @cottsay (Kilted)
- Preparing for Kilted sync 2026-09-16. Note that Kilted reaches end of life in November.
- @sloretz (Lyrical)
- A few regressions, targeting a sync this week.
Working Group Updates
- ROS Office Hours
- Sep 25 is cancelled in favor of the ROSCon hackathon, which runs the same day.
- Next meeting: Oct 9, 2026.
Proposal: joint ROS and Gazebo office hours. The Gazebo PMC is interested in running office hours of their own, and rather than hold two, the suggestion is to combine them and use breakout rooms if the session gets crowded.- Proposal: an APAC-friendly slot. Alongside the existing session, which suits Europe and North America, a second slot oriented toward North America and Asia. Roughly 7pm Pacific would give decent overlap with Singapore and Japan, for reference Open RMF runs at 6pm Pacific and Gazebo at 8pm Pacific. If you are interested in attending or hosting such a session, please say so.
- Client Library Working Group (@alsora)
- Next meeting: Sep 18, 2026 (agenda)
- Accelerated Memory Transport Working Group (@ahcorde)
- Next meeting: Sep 16, 2026. Mostly ROSCon preparation, though buffer backend development continues regardless.
- ROSGraph Working Group (@emersonknapp)
- Next meeting: Sep 15, 2026 (today). Preparing for the ROSCon talk.
- Initial Python node generation from NoDL is working. C++ generation is being actively tested in a sample package built for the talk. The first-pass feature set is close to wrapped, which the group is calling NoDL v2, with ideas for smoothing it out over the coming year.
- Open question raised: whether the generated Python nodes carry type hints. Contributions welcome if not.
- SIG Physical AI
- Next meeting: Sep 18, 2026. No updates since the last meeting.
Agenda
- [@Katherine_Scott] ROSCon hackathon, Friday September 25
- Starts around 9:00 am. Bring your own coffee, none will be provided. Pizza for lunch.
- You must sign up in advance. Do not just show up. A list has to go to Google beforehand, and the name you register with must match your passport. The office is strict about this.
- Format: 30 to 60 minutes of introduction covering how to get involved, how to review pull requests, and how to send a good one. Breakout rooms for the rest of the day, with PMC members on hand to help people over hurdles such as building from source.
- Ask of every PMC member, this week: mark specific issues and pull requests as
good first issueso attendees have concrete things to pick up. Also contribute your name, face, and where to find your project to the intro deck, along with a slide saying what you would specifically like people to work on. - Closing ceremony with prizes for two or three standout pull requests, plus shirt codes and holographic ROS stickers.
- Everyone needs a call to action for new contributors. What should they do when they get home? Coming to Waffle and ROS Office Hours are the obvious ones. If your project needs co-maintainers, say so.
- [@mjcarroll] ROSCon, what to watch for
- A meta-request: we all enjoy each other’s company, but make a point of talking to people who are not PMC members or committers. That is how the project finds new people, and how we tell them that they can just do things.
- @Katherine_Scott reinforced the point: go in with a list of things you want to recruit people for, because people generally will not do things unless asked. She also has a large quantity of ROS stickers arriving and wants every PMC member to take a stack and use them to start conversations about what people are working on and what would make their lives better.
- @Katherine_Scott is running a workshop covering nodes, topics, services, actions, and parameters against a Gazebo simulation. Help is welcome; message her if you can attend.
A shared Google doc will be set up for conversation notes. Jot down anything interesting from conversations as you go, so we can debrief collectively afterward. @mjcarroll will create it.- Sessions flagged as relevant to the PMC: alternative package managers, the infrastructure project update, physical AI, REP 157 on the next step in zero-copy and the middleware, Rust development with Bazel, and the session carrying the async node, ROS 2 logging, and executor talks.
- The conference app carries the attendee list, roughly sorted by declared interests.
- [@mjcarroll] M-turtle roadmap
- Nothing to add beyond last week. The roadmap is normally socialized around ROSCon, so expect this to pick up afterward.
- The first person not on the PMC/TGC to message the ROS project lead on zulip gets a free ROS T-Shirt.
Thanks,
~mc
Your Friendly Neighborhood Turtle Herder