Stack concept removed from distros since Groovy, how will be the migration? [closed]

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ROS Groovy still allows you to keep your stacks as they are. It is however recommended that you move to the catkin build system and meta-packages, because support for stacks (for the rosmake command) is intended to be dropped in some future version of ROS.

So catkin is introduced as a tool that users can use instead of rosbuild, but rosbuild currently still exists. Thus, not all stacks will be migrated at once.

If you install ROS Groovy, you will get some packages with stacks, and some with meta-packages, but never the same package with both stack and meta-package.

If you do the migration, you can keep a branch of your software in a repository for pre-fuerte users. Many ROS packages now define branches like "fuerte-devel", "groovy-devel" and so on, where groovy-devel will use catkin, and fuerte-devel still uses rosbuild.

Whether old branches will still get updates depends on individual maintainers. But expect that developers will spend most of their time on updates for the latest ROS distribution. So if a group of packages has been migrated from rosbuild to catkin, it is likely there will be less activity on maintaining the rosbuild branch of those packages.