Gazebo starts Gazebo-M release, moves to C++20 for ROS alignment

At the August 10, 2026 Gazebo PMC meeting, the Open Source Robotics Foundation kicked off the Gazebo-M release process, with committers now submitting naming proposals. The release sequence deliberately skips K and L versions to sync the Gazebo name with ROS's naming convention. This marks the beginning of a major version cycle for the open-source robotics simulator, setting expectations for the next stable release in the ecosystem.

Infrastructure remained a key concern. The buildfarm is still not fully stable after the Anubis update, with the team actively investigating system stability. A new Abseil dependency in Homebrew caused CI failures, but reruns should resolve them. The C++20 transition is moving forward to align with ROS Rolling and Lyrical; a gz-cmake update supporting C++20 and C++23 has already been merged, and ABI compatibility and CMake config updates are under review. Ubuntu 26.04 packages built successfully through gz-fuel-tools11, but gz-transport15 and gz-rendering10 failed. On the modeling front, improvements to the custom ColladaLoader are underway, with coordination to integrate the assimp loader and maintain a unified test suite. A gz-sim test failure traced to numerical imprecision in sdformat was addressed via a contributor's pull request.