ROS was started less than three years ago and much has changed in that
short period of time. Now, with over 30 institutions contributing
public, open source repositories and over 40 different robots
supporting ROS, we recognize that we must make additional efforts to
incorporate community feedback into the ongoing development of ROS.
We are adopting a new "ROS Enhancement Proposal" (REP) process to
enable members of the community to propose, design, and develop new
features for ROS and its core libraries. Thanks to the efforts of the
Python community and it's PEP process, we were able to quickly
bootstrap this new process.
The process is fairly straightforward. Anyone in the community can author a REP and circulate it to the ros-developers list. An index of REPs is stored in REP 0*, which defines the REP process.
We will soon circulate several REPs for public comment to provide
information on current work with ROS. We will also circulate process-
and information-type REPs to help better define the REP process.
We invite members of the community to review REP 1 and put together
their own REPs for consideration.
* REP 1 is mostly a search-and-replace of PEP 1, so much credit to
Barry Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton, David Goodger.