Gazebo shifts release to March, aligns with ROS starting 2027

The Gazebo Project Management Committee (PMC) has officially changed the release cadence for Gazebo, moving from September to March starting with the upcoming Gazebo M release in March 2027. This decision, detailed in a community proposal, addresses several pain points: the previous September release led to code freezes during summer months, overlapping with ROSCon deadlines and making it difficult to incorporate contributions from Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and summer interns. By shifting to March, the release team now has a more manageable timeline, ensuring feature freezes don't coincide with conference preparation. Additionally, the alignment with ROS is significantly improved—the new release will be only two months apart from the corresponding ROS version (ROS M in May 2027), compared to the previous seven-month gap.

To further harmonize the ecosystems, Gazebo will skip the letters K and L, jumping directly to M. This ensures synchronized version letters with ROS going forward. Support windows for each Gazebo release will now match the end-of-life (EOL) dates of their paired ROS release, giving developers longer and more predictable support cycles. The extension applies retroactively to older Gazebo releases as well, as documented in the updated Gazebo Releases page. This change is expected to simplify dependency management for robotics developers who rely on both Gazebo and ROS, reducing confusion and easing long-term project planning.