ROS 1.3.0 Released, Unstable

ROS 1.3.0 has been released. This is an unstable release and is the first of the 1.3.x "odd-cycle" releases. During this release cycle, we expect to rapidly integrate new features and the stack is expected to be volatile.

In particular, much of the work for the ROS 1.3.x release cycle is related to REP 100, ROS Stack Separation. There are several major changes in this initial release, with more to come. For ROS 1.3.0, we have implemented the following changes:

• genmsg_cpp has been deleted. This ends support for the current experimental rosoct and rosjava libraries.
• All rx* packages have been moved to the rx stack. This was done to remove heavyweight WxWindows dependencies from the ROS stack.
• rosdoc has been moved to the new documentation stack. This was done to remove heavyweight Doxygen, Epydoc, and Sphinx dependencies from the ROS stack.

The next major change will be to migrate the ROS middleware libraries to the ros_comm stack. This will mainly have impact on stack dependency declarations.

We've also included deprecation warnings in the rosrecord and rosbagmigration packages for this release. Use of these APIs should be ported to the new rosbag library, which has support for the latest bag format.

For more changes, please the ROS 1.3.0 changelist.

Also, you may wish to now consult the rx and documentation stack changelists for packages that were formerly in the ROS stack.

For more information on the ROS 1.3.x releases, you can see REP 101, ROS 1.4 Release Schedule.