I hope it will make it possible to release great Gazebo plugins as ROS buildfarm packages, as we were used to from the Classic days! (even better would be to be able to release non-ROS Gazebo plugins directly on Gazebo buildfarm, but that’s a different story).
Yeah, we’ve started thinking about how we can better support community contributed plugins (see Third-party/external plugin repository · Issue #1995 · gazebosim/gz-sim · GitHub for the initial issue). One thought goes along the lines of what you suggested—releasing Gazebo plugins as ROS packages, maybe with some extra metadata that indicates that they are Gazebo plugins. Still in its early stages, but we plan to work on it in the next few months.
I’m especially curious how will this integration change the adoption of the lower-level libraries (gz-math, gz-common) by ROS packages. I see a great potential there.
Packages up-to gz-math (i.e, gz-cmake, gz-utils, and gz-math) are already part of ROS core since they are used in Rviz. This has been the case since Humble, but one-off vendor packages were created just for Rviz and were not updated when the upstream packages were updated. The new vendor packages bring all the Gazebo libraries, provide very convenient CMake shims, and will be in sync with the upstream packages, so, yes, I hope there will be more adoption.
I’m just curious whether this integration is a result of a long-existing plan, or if it was started as a result of the feedback you gathered some time ago asking about the hurdles in migration to new Gazebo.
From my perspective, we’ve been looking for ways to better integrate Gazebo and ROS for some time (e.g. use of ign-math in Rviz starting in Humble), and the vendor packages idea was brought up as one approach as we were brainstorming on how to package Gazebo for Jazzy since it wasn’t going to be available in upstream Ubuntu Noble. But the feedback we got, especially around the complexity caused by having the major version number in the names of packages, definitely encouraged us to pursue the vendor package idea. So I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who filled out the survey!