ROS PMC Minutes for September 23, 2025

ROS ROS PMC
, , ,
1

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

  • Formal Business
    • Vote to add Skyler M. (@skye.galaxy) as a committer mentee, mentored by Alberto (@alsora)
      • Alberto Moves, Steven! seconds, passes by consensus

Ongoing Tasks

ROS Bosses

  • ROS Humble (@christophebedard/@audrow)
    • @MiguelCompany asks why rosidl_typesupport_fastrtps backports weren’t released
      • Likely overlooked when doing the sync. In the future, let’s make sure that Miguel can do releases of packages that he maintains (appears that he as the ability, just doesn’t know the process)
  • ROS Jazzy (@marcogg)
    • No updates
  • ROS Kilted (@cottsay)
    • Sync early next week
  • ROS Rolling (@Yadunund)
    • Sync late this week

Agenda Items

  • [@ahcorde] - Vendor packages (Increase pixi platform support and reduce vendor packages · Issue #1729 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub)
    • vendor packages exist to provide dependencies on systems without package managers (Windows), and we no longer need to do that because of Pixi.
    • The vendor packages are a tool for getting the ball rolling, but their existence implies a burden on both our compute resources and our package maintainers
    • Most of our vendor packages were only being exercised on Windows, and were pinned to the versions that appear in the Ubuntu LTS.
    • If there’s a bug in our dependency, we should file tickets appropriately and drive the fix upstream so that everyone can benefit. It’s a different kind of burden, but one that the whole community shares.
    • Pros
      • alternative sourcing of dependencies
      • leaving them with no option to build the dep themselves by default
      • Reduce CI failures
    • Cons
      • doesn’t compile with some specific compiler version like clang on some specific platform like RHEL or QNX and we have to patch it because the new version of the package is not available in distro
      • critical vulnerability or bug and new version is not available on some old Unix
      • Linux_clang_libcxx is broken
        1. Because of kdl_parser + assimp
    • Chris made a list https://github.com/ros2/rosbag2/pull/2166#issuecomment-3299655595
      • we have patches for mcap and zstd.
    • Discussion (Wildly Summarized)
      • @cottsay: We should generally strive to reduce number of vendor packages and work with upstream whenever possible.
      • @MichaelOrlov We still have a few complicated vendor packages that also patch and cover changes between various supported platforms. Losing this ability makes for more work.
    • Conclusion @ahcorde is going to bring a list of current vendor packages and how “complex” they are so that the PMC can evaluate and decide which are the highest priority to remove versus keeping for another release.
  • [@sloretz] Downloading example code and referencing it in documentation instead of copying inline
    • Discussion (Summarized from @nuclearsandwich/@MiguelCompany/@sloretz /@InvincibleRMC )
      • There is basic agreement that this is a good idea, but different opinions on how to actually implement and keep synced between the various repositories
    • Conclusion: @InvincibleRMC is going to put together a requirements doc so that we can understand what the needs are before trying to formulate technical approaches. This would give us something to trade off against as well
  • [@MiguelCompany] Status of Bump asio to 1.28.1 by Mario-DL · Pull Request #21 · ros2/choco-packages · GitHub
    • @nuclearsandwich LGTM needs to be merged and cut to a release so we can update docs.

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

ROS News for the Week of September 22nd, 2025
2

Post about the libboost rosdep rules: PSA: Debian Bookwork Boost rosdep entries