tl;dr: The SDFormat repository has moved to the Ignition Robotics GitHub organization! No action needed from end users.
Brief history
The SDFormat specification and parser used to be embedded into Gazebo Classic’s code base back in the day. In fact, version control provides a glimpse into the past: if you look into Gazebo’s 1.9.0 tag from 2013 you can see some of SDFormat’s earlier versions.
By Gazebo’s major version 2, SDFormat was moved to its own project, which used to be hosted at a BitBucket mercurial repository at the time. This opened the way for SDFormat to be used by simulators other than Gazebo.
As Gazebo classic got refactored into Ignition Gazebo, more libraries were broken off Gazebo’s codebase into independent projects. After SDFormat, all parts taken off Gazebo started being branded as Ignition libraries. A new BitBucket organization was created to host these libraries (Bitbucket), but Gazebo classic and SDFormat remained in the https://bitbucket.org/osrf/ organization.
When Open Robotics moved its BitBucket mercurial repositories to GitHub in 2020, the same structure was maintained: SDFormat and Gazebo classic stayed on the https://github.com/osrf/ organization, while all the other Ignition libraries were moved to https://github.com/ignitionrobotics/.
What exactly is happening now?
This week, these 2 repositories have been moved:
| Old | New |
|---|---|
| https://github.com/osrf/sdformat/ | https://github.com/ignitionrobotics/sdformat/ |
| https://github.com/osrf/sdf_tutorials/ | https://github.com/ignitionrobotics/sdf_tutorials/ |
Why move?
Since the first Ignition release, Acropolis, SDFormat has been included as one of the libraries distributed with every release. This means that SDFormat’s release schedule has been following Ignition’s ever since.
SDFormat is one of the central pieces in the Ignition ecosystem. Like all Ignition libraries, it’s meant to be a general-purpose project that is designed to be usable by multiple projects and independent of Gazebo.
The move will consolidate SDFormat’s status as a first-class member of the Ignition family. Having all libraries in the same GitHub organization should also simplify a lot of the tooling and project planning for Ignition.
As a user, what do I need to do?
No actions are required for end-users.
GitHub will continue to redirect the https://github.com/osrf/sdformat/ address to https://github.com/ignitionrobotics/sdformat/, so we don’t expect users to need to change any tooling or workflows.
Over time, we expect the community will eventually have updated all resources with the new address.
The Ignition Dev Team