Gazebo Harmonic Tutorial Party
Gazebo’s 8th collection, Harmonic, is planned for release on October 2, 2023. To make sure we have the best release possible the team goes over all the tutorials using pre-releases to check that everything is working as it should and make final tweaks. It is incredibly important that these tutorials function smoothly as they are where our new users first meet Gazebo and we want them to have a good experience! As we’ve done in past releases, and as we recently did with the ROS 2 Iron release, we’d like to invite the community to join the party! If you are a Gazebo classic user, or new to Gazebo entirely, this should be a great opportunity to get your feet wet with the new Gazebo. The tutorial party is also a great way for prospective interns and GSoC students to get familiar with Gazebo, meet the community, and close their first Github issue.
We’ll be partying from August 31st until September 14th, 2023. We’ll kick the party off on August 31st with a community meeting to walk everyone through the tutorial party process. To sweeten the pot, we will once again be sending out Harmonic t-shirts 
to the top five tutorial party animals (those who finish reviewing the most tutorials). Every single one of the tutorial reviewers will be included in the Harmonic release notes.
Important Dates 
- 2023-07-28 Harmonic Feature Freeze
- 2023-08-30 Harmonic Code Freeze
- 2023-08-31 10am Tutorial Party Kickoff Meeting / Discourse Post
- 2023-08-31 → 2023-09-14 Harmonic Tutorial Party
- 2023-09-18 → 2023-09-22 Internal Q&A
- 2023-09-27 Community Meeting Demo / Tutorial Party top contributors announced
- 2023-10-02 Official Release Announcement
- TBD Graphic Release and T-Shirt Sale – (T-shirt / art will be delayed)
Tutorial Party Launch Party Details 
We’ll be holding a tutorial party launch party on 2023-08-31T17:00:00Z . At the launch party we’ll explain the tutorial party process in depth and walk you through all the steps of testing the next Gazebo release. If you can’t make it we’ll also post everything you need to know to the GazeboSim community forum.
To join us use the link below:
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/wni-cfkh-zeo
Or dial: ‪(US) +1 458-242-4502‬ PIN: ‪224 403 902‬#
More phone numbers: https://tel.meet/wni-cfkh-zeo?pin=4765503513723
The Google hangout link is also available on the official OSRF Google calendar.
How to Party! 
The party process is fairly simple, and we’ll make a detailed post the day of the Tutorial party. If all goes according to plan you should be able to validate a few tutorials in an hour or two and check out some recent upgrades to Gazebo. We’ll be using Github issues to track our progress as we’ve created an automated system for generating all of the different tutorials we need to review.
Here are the steps (to party):
- Pick a tutorial flavor by filtering out the github issues using the corresponding labels. We’ve created a meta issue which will be a good starting point and has some helpful tips on how to filter github issues. Note that the Harmonic release supports two installation methods (source and binaries) and a few host operating systems (Ubuntu Jammy, and MacOS Monterey, and Windows 10).
- Install the pre-releases on your computer (we’ll include directions for each host operating system)
- Find an open issue from the Gazebo testing repository and comment on the issue stating that you would like to test the tutorial contained in the issue.
- Run through the tutorial from start to finish! Be really thorough; if you think you could improve the tutorial feel free to add to it. At this point one of three things will happen:
- The tutorial works perfectly!
- Close the issue with a comment that everything works as expected.
- The tutorial has issues…
- But, you can fix them and send us a PR.
- Open the PR and drop a link on the issue.
- You can’t fix them (that’s ok!)
- Post a comment describing the problems you faced.
- But, you can fix them and send us a PR.
- Try another tutorial!