July 04, 2023
The maintainers meeting is a meeting for the developer team to coordinate on pressing issues and to plan the development of the PX4 Autopilot project, the community is welcome to join and listen, but wonât be able to speak unless specific access is granted ahead of time.
Meeting Link
Agenda
- v1.14 Release Candidate
- Remote ID development
- Release procedure review
- The Next release brief discussion
Meeting Notes
v1.14 Release Candidate
The beta2 was from March 22nd, and we havenât had any beta/release candidate tags yet.
- This resulted in 3+months discrepancy in current development vs user experience
- Getting the release candidate out is therefore very needed & if not, even a beta should be cut.
We have fixes in for Optical Flow preflight check (needs to be backported):
- Optical flow: pre-flight check improvements by bresch ¡ Pull Request #21789 ¡ PX4/PX4-Autopilot ¡ GitHub
- Optical Flow Fixes by AlexKlimaj ¡ Pull Request #21769 ¡ PX4/PX4-Autopilot ¡ GitHub
v5 target having flash overflow
PWM configuration PR is still hanging: https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/pull/21513
- What is left to do? Canât we include these changes and cut a release candidate?
Update: Matthias is porting it to 1.14 now, it is important to alert people so that the ESCs donât start spinning randomly when upgrading to 1.14.
Backport PR that needs to be merged:
Note: The PR to a main
branch hasnât been merged, and currently itâs uncertain if the fix is actually correct.
CP_DIST parameter doesnât exist QGC error â Will create issue in QGC to resolve.
Summary: We will merge the PRs above, but will have to wait until we resolve all the remaining PR / Issues, and we canât conclude on the exact release date
v5 target overflowing
px4_fmu-v5_test
target overflowing by 600+ bytes: (Mission) FeasibilityChecker: remove duplicate line ¡ PX4/PX4-Autopilot@dccfcb8 ¡ GitHub
We could bump the compiler version, Ramon will check on this.
Remote ID development
A lot of things are unclear about the exact implementation of the Remote ID feature in PX4. Such as:
- What happens when the remote ID module loses signal during flight? What should PX4 do?
- Which messages should PX4 actually send/receive from the Remote ID module?
- How can we make the UAV ID tamper-proof (as required by regulation)? A simple parameter wonât cut it.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to say that Remote ID shouldnât be officially supported in v1.14, and should be the focus of the next release.
- What are your opinions on this?
- Anyone with suggestions on who can lead the Remote ID discussion in the working group?
Current development coordination issue: Remote ID Development Coordination ¡ Issue #21777 ¡ PX4/PX4-Autopilot ¡ GitHub
Summary: Maintainers arenât currently very familliar with Remote ID, so we will have to form a work group to organize this.
Release procedure review
- It was quite easy to have a big delay in beta release (e.g. beta2 for v1.14 was cut more than 3 months ago), should we cut the beta every week instead?
Discussion: Beta release can be frequent, wouldnât affect safety concerns. But also, we may not have some issues resolved, so we donât want to cut it too frequently.
- If we have a release blocker that isnât getting resolved for more than a week or two, what should we do?
Feedback: To have a stable release, we should have the issues resolved, and we often have focus getting scattered, so we donât always achieve timely release due to that.
Core components list: PX4 Release procedure by junwoo091400 ¡ Pull Request #2331 ¡ PX4/PX4-user_guide ¡ GitHub
- We had the progress staled for a while, but it is relevant, and we will discuss next weekâs call.
Further comments on backporting process here: https://github.com/PX4/PX4-user_guide/pull/2331#issuecomment-1619210692
- Individual backports are time consuming. Shouldnât we have one person cherry pick all the PRs to backport at once & merge that beta PR & cut the beta each time?
Feedback: Right now, most delay / problem is merging to main
itself, instead of backporting things (which is easier). We donât need to have one person backport everything (it is also more prone to test / featuer failures, since PR is too big).
The next release after v1.14
- Which feature set/changes should we include? Please add your thoughts here: [v1.15 (or v2.0)] Feature / Improvements discussion ¡ Issue #21688 ¡ PX4/PX4-Autopilot ¡ GitHub
Note: We will discuss this in the next weekâs meeting.
(next release question)
I fixed all Jenkins errors/checks on:
Would you mind taking a look at it and, maybe, assigning a team member to follow up in the future?
What is the plan? Timeline?
Thanks!
Feedback: We will need to update the flight review for broken compatibility. Changes in QGC should be fine. Beat will give a review on this