Hi Everyone,
We are pleased to announce the ROS Groovy Galapagos Beta 1 Release is available for download!
In this release we have focused on core infrastructure. The core build tools prototyped in Fuerte have been significantly refined. We have upgrade the continuous integration and documentation infrastructure to be more modular and enable scaling better.
One of the core upgrades has been the buildsystem catkin, which is based on CMake. It has been designed to provide the core usability of the rosbuild ecosystem but converge to more standard software engineering practices. For more information on catkin please see the catkin wiki page and the associated tutorials](http://www.ros.org/wiki/catkin/Tutorials)
There has also been a significant overhaul of the core tutorials. It is recommended to review and reference back to them: http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials all the Tutorials beyond Creating A Package have been converted to support the new and old build system.
For instructions installing please visit the Groovy installation page. There are currently well over 300 packages building successful on all three supported Ubuntu distros (Oneiric, Precise, Quantal) with over 200 of them being built using catkin. This constitutes over 75% of the released packages from Fuerte. During the beta is a great time for maintainers of the stacks which are not currently building to release their stacks for Groovy. The status of the builds can be found on the debbuild status page
There have been many other upgrades in the groovy development process. One of the larger upgrades involved changing the recommended gui framework from Wx to Qt. There is a new rqt_gui which can embed Python and C++ plugins. Rviz has been ported and has a new plugin API. Almost all the core Wx based visualization tools have been switched to have Qt equivalents, and those that have not switched yet are expected to be ported very soon.
Three REPs have been released during the Groovy development cycle:
REP 127 Specification of package manifest format
REP 128 Naming Conventions for Catkin Based Workspaces
REP 131 ROS Groovy Variants
Ubuntu Users: Please make sure to use the Python tools from apt and not pip. The pip based installs tend to go out of date and not get updated with the rest of the system.
Note: For the beta we have disabled 32 bit binaries to decrease the load on the build farm. They will be re-enabled during the beta testing cycle before the full release.
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