A new era for Gazebo

General
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A new era for Gazebo

Hi, community!

The simulation team at Open Robotics is excited to announce a big change that’s coming up. We’ll be retiring the “Ignition :ignition:” name in favor of the good old “Gazebo :gazebo:” brand that we all love.

We introduced the Ignition name seven years ago when we started work on major architectural changes in Gazebo. We used the Ignition name to differentiate the new approach from the Gazebo that had come before, which is now referred to as Gazebo Classic. Those changes have gone very well, thanks in no small part to contributions and support from our worldwide community of users and other stakeholders. The new system is now mature and proven in use (e.g., the DARPA SubT program), with LTS releases available on a regular schedule. In parallel, we have wound down work on Gazebo Classic, with Gazebo 11 being our last release in that line (supported through 2025).

We’re going to reclaim the Gazebo name to describe our new and ongoing work, and retire the Ignition name. We’re guessing that more than a few of you are happy to hear about this change, given the frequency with which we continue to get questions about when to use “Ignition” vs. “Gazebo” vs. “Ignition Gazebo” and what the differences are.

You may be wondering why we’re making the change now. The reason is that we have encountered a trademark obstacle regarding our use of the name “Ignition”. In the course of resolving that issue, we’re taking the opportunity to simplify things, for us and for you.

What’s changing?

So what’s happening in practice? In summary, each place where the name “Ignition” or “ign” is used will be converted to a Gazebo counterpart (“Gazebo” or “gz”). The Ignition logo will also be replaced by the Gazebo logo. Changes will be made in:

  • Websites
  • GitHub organizations and repositories
  • Namespaces, command line tools, shared libraries, directories, APIs, files
  • UIs
  • Documentation

Timeline

As always, we strive to make the transition for users as painless as possible. That’s why we’ll be adopting a tick-tock deprecation strategy starting from the Garden release, wherever possible. That is:

  • Garden: all names default to Gazebo, but aliases are available so users can keep using Ignition, with warnings.
  • Future releases: the Ignition aliases will be eventually removed and users will need to use Gazebo.
  • Past releases: Citadel and Fortress will continue to be supported according to their published schedules. Wherever possible, we’ll add aliases for Gazebo into those older releases such that new users of those versions can write modern code from the start and have an even easier migration to Garden and later.

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We’ll be updating this post as major milestones are complete. The full transition will be complete by the Garden release in September.

:gazebo: Gazebo Dev Team :gazebo:

12 Likes
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Wow… :smiley: Welcome back, Gazebo! So should we also expect Gazebo Rendering, Gazebo Math etc.?

Was the trademark problem with this company? I remember some searches for Ignition stuff brought me there…

obrazek
obrazek1067×109 22.4 KB

Don’t you want to force them to remove the ROS logo from the rightmost part? :smiley:

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Correct. And Ignition Gazebo will become Gazebo Sim.

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Just “Sim”? Not “Simulator” or “Simulation”?

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It stands for “simulator”

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Finally! No more confusion for others when I explain about ig–gazebo!

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Hi all:

Some hours ago we have moved our GitHub organizations ignitionrobotics to gazebosim and ignition-forks to gazebo-forks and changing the ign/ignition names to gz/gazebo. The redirections should work for almost all the usual operations although some problems can appear if anyone is using the REST api using previous URLs.

Thanks.

3 Likes
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Hi there,
how would these changes affect Gazebo classic concerning backward compatibility etc.? Will there also be a tick-tock strategy there?
Will there then be a new release of Gazebo classic?

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Hi rfn123,

Welcome! These changes are for new Gazebo (formerly Ignition), so this will not affect classic gazebo at all.

Gazebo11 will be the last release and it will be on EOL once it’s 2025 (if I remember correctly).

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Thanks for the quick answer!

How come these changes not affect Gazebo classic though, since Gazebo classic is using the former ignition packages in the source code, e.g. ignition-math?
Hence my confusion…

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Hm,

by classic Gazebo, you are not referring to the list here under “released”?

If you are referring to Gazebo11 using ign plugins then I have no idea. I use new ones only (between Citadel to latest)

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Sorry for the confusion, yes I meant Gazebo11.
@chapulina @jrivero any enlightment on this question :)?

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All current stable releases will remain stable and will be supported until their original EOL dates. That includes Gazebo 9, 11, Citadel and Fortress.

Yes, the tick-tock strategy is described on the post above.

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This sure is wonderful but the Gazebo Docs Page still has ign commands under the
Run section

STEP 2 RUN

ign gazebo shapes.sdf

All the commands under Run have ign and not gz this is very confusing, is this intended or an oversight.
If this is an oversight please do change the commands :smile:

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This should fix it, no?