This documents the steps to be taken prior to making a new release of the nav2 stack.

Summary

Ensure all dependencies are listed in the package.xml files by doing a build of all of ROS2, dependencies, and navigation 2 in one workspace.
Ensure all dependencies are released. by using rosdep to pull in dependencies instead of building them ourselves.
Ensure the test suite passes

Detailed Steps

Ensure all dependencies are listed in the package.xml files

We want to ensure that every package has a complete list of its dependencies in the package.xml file. This can be done by not sourcing any ros setup.bash files. Instead we need to build everything as one big repo.

There is a docker file to do that, so run

sudo docker build -t nav2:full_ros_build --build-arg ROS2_BRANCH=dashing --build-arg http_proxy=http://myproxy.example.com:80 --build-arg https_proxy=http://myproxy.example.com:80 -f Dockerfile.full_ros_build ./

ROS2_BRANCH should be the release you are targeting or just main if you want to compare against ROS2 main.

Ensure all dependencies are released.

We want to ensure the correct version of all our dependencies have been released to the branch we are targeting. To do that, we skip the underlay.repos install step and rely solely on rosdep to install everything.

There is a dockerfile to do that as well, so run

sudo docker build -t nav2:rosdep_only_build --build-arg ROS2_BRANCH=dashing --build-arg http_proxy=http://myproxy.example.com:80 --build-arg https_proxy=http://myproxy.example.com:80 -f Dockerfile.release_branch ./

As before, ROS2_BRANCH is the branch you are targeting. In this case, there is no main option. We can only run this dockerfile against a set of released packages.

Ensure the test suite passes

Ensure the test suite passes in one of the docker images you just built.

Crystal

For the crystal release, run

sudo docker run nav2:crystal colcon test

Dashing and newer

For newer releases, run

sudo docker run nav2:crystal src/navigation2/tools/run_test_suite.bash