Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-11-02

Hi Gazebo Community!

This week’s meeting was held on 2026-11-02T19:00:00Z and the following is a summary:

PMC Business

• Following the end of Daylight Saving Time in the US, the PMC is voting asynchronously to move the weekly meeting time to 19:00 UTC to preserve the existing local meeting time. Because the OSRA TGC charter strictly requires meetings to be scheduled in UTC, a formal vote is held each time Daylight Saving Time begins or ends.

New agenda items

• Maintainer Audit & Rebalancing: Phase 2 of the Gazebo Maintainer Audit & Rebalancing Workspace (2026) is complete, with primary and secondary maintainers now assigned and balanced across nearly all Gazebo repositories (including updated primary/secondary assignments for gz-common and gz-gui). A summary of the changes will be shared so maintainers can update package.xml and CODEOWNERS files across their repositories.
• Multi-Repository Chained Contributions & AI Workflows: The PMC discussed how to handle large contributions that open multiple chained pull requests simultaneously across several repositories without a prior design discussion (see gazebosim/gz-sensors#690):
  • Review bandwidth & CI load: Maintainers want to welcome and retain enthusiastic contributors while setting realistic expectations around review bandwidth and avoiding excessive buildfarm CI load from large stacks of simultaneous PRs or draft PRs.
  • AI tooling & federated repositories: Participants discussed whether Gazebo’s federated repository layout creates friction for modern AI-assisted workflows. Automated review tools like CodeRabbit (free for open-source projects and able to track multi-repo context) were discussed alongside concerns about adding extra barriers and AI-generated code comments drifting out of sync with implementation details. Using AGENTS.md files to guide contributors was also suggested, though security and cross-directory contamination concerns were raised in favor of opt-in mechanisms like skills or pre-commit hooks.
  • Next steps: While a formal policy change was deferred for further discussion, suggested improvements include updating the contributor guidelines to encourage upfront design discussions for cross-repository features and preventing automatic CI runs on draft PRs.

Updates

Simulation, Physics & C++20

• Kinematic mode: Most kinematic mode changes have been backported to Jetty, including dartsim joint DoF index validation (gazebosim/gz-physics#1165, merged), while TimelinePublisher system backports remain in review for Ionic (gazebosim/gz-sim#4096) and Harmonic (gazebosim/gz-sim#4097). Additionally, a new feature and parameter to optionally disable contacts while in kinematic mode (gazebosim/gz-physics#1139, gazebosim/gz-sim#4101) improved real-time factor performance from roughly 30% to 90%.
• C++20 migration (gazebosim/gz-cmake#580): Merged a Rotary change in gz-cmake to use CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD for cppcheck instead of a hardcoded standard (gazebosim/gz-cmake#611). An upstream ogre-next PR to make GpuProgramParameters compile under C++20 was also shared in the written notes and is currently in review (OGRECave/ogre-next#596).
• Multi-physics & Zenoh CI testing in gz-sim: Two Rotary PRs are open for review to run gz-sim integration tests across multiple physics engines (gazebosim/gz-sim#4100) and to test Zenoh as the default transport backend on Ubuntu Resolute CI (gazebosim/gz-sim#4085).

Releases

• gz-physics: New releases prepared across distributions: 9.6.0 for Jetty (gazebosim/gz-physics#1168), 8.5.0 for Ionic (gazebosim/gz-physics#1169), 7.9.0 for Harmonic (gazebosim/gz-physics#1170), and 5.4.1 for Fortress (gazebosim/gz-physics#1171).
• gz-sim: Version 10.6.0 for Jetty is in progress (gazebosim/gz-sim#4167).

Infrastructure, Buildfarm & Packaging

• Buildfarm warnings & Homebrew bottles: Ongoing investigations continue into CMake, trimesh deprecation, and unused variable warnings (osrf/buildfarm-tools#287). This includes removing an unused BUILD_DOCS CMake variable in gz-plugin Homebrew builds caused by gazebo-tooling/release-tools#1574, with proposed fixes in osrf/homebrew-simulation#3631 and gazebo-tooling/release-tools#1579. Separately, a malfunctioning Homebrew bottle build machine is being troubleshot.
• Bazel Central Registry (BCR): A PR in gz-sensors (gazebosim/gz-sensors#658) disables publishing pre-releases to BCR so that only stable tags are submitted, reducing unnecessary review churn for BCR maintainers before upcoming pre-releases are tagged.

Community & GSoC

• GSoC 2026 & Community Meeting: The GSoC 2026 final report on scalable multi-robot simulation in ROS 2 and Gazebo is now live (Discourse post), and slides from last week’s community meeting are available.

As always, the meeting notes are available at Gazebo PMC meeting weekly agenda - Google Docs.

The next Gazebo PMC meeting will be on 2026-11-09T19:00:00Z
(See Open Source Robotics Foundation official events)