PX4 Maintainers Call: March 07, 2023

:calendar: March 07, 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 won’t be able to speak unless specific access is granted ahead of time.

:selfie: Meeting Link

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Agenda

  • Release Coordination
    • PX4 v1.13.3
  • Finalize maintainer role description
  • Identify maintainer opportunities
  • Open mic for maintainers

:memo: Meeting Notes

Release Coordination

  • Need for point releases are always there
  • Currently Ramon has been managing backporting for supporting extra hardware for manufacturers

1.13 Backporting

1.14 Release

  • Project board: PX4 v1.14 Release · GitHub
  • How to branch out: we need consensus from all maintainers on each of their sector
  • Getting testing is the key before the release (in the past always bug reports came in after release happened)
  • What we need: Components broken down & people for each category getting involved
  • We can have a deadline for branching out 1.14, so people can get important things in.
  • TJ: If we have board for different components, and have maintainers keep track of if it’s ok to make a release

Goal

  • Point release: with specific feature sets added
  • Patch release: adding bug fixes at most

TODOs

  • Having procedure for releases
  • We can set the deadline for branch out date for 1.14
  • Defining the core features: Needs to be together with use-cases.
  • Check the status on core features whether they are release-able
  • Junwoo: Create core list PR & Release criteria PR for the Docs

Note: Getting testing (next step), would be the bottleneck.

How can we get more involvement from user/companies for features?

  • How do we get them to do testing on the latest releases?
  • One solution would be to know who (company / individual) cares about what, so we know who to approach
  • Reason why companies wouldn’t test so much: Because there’s no reason to
  • Reaosn why they may try the release: to try out a *new feature.
  • It’s very hard to bring back unintrested / branched out companies back to testing.

Maintainer Role Description

Update: PX4 Release procedure documentation PR is up here: