ROS PMC Pours Funding into CI Infrastructure, Fixes Windows Flakiness

The Robot Operating System's Package Maintainers Committee (ROS PMC) held its weekly meeting on August 11, 2026, and the minutes reveal a clear priority: infrastructure. Funding discussions are ongoing, but the working consensus is to direct the majority of money toward CI (continuous integration) infrastructure. The target is to settle the decision before ROSCon, now roughly five weeks out, where it will be announced. Execution will largely fall to the Infrastructure PMC and OSRF, with ownership deliberately spread across several people to avoid single points of contract management.

On the technical side, the buildfarm report highlighted a long-standing Windows-only test failure that has now been root-caused. The issue stems from SIGTERM being sent to all processes on Windows, which leaves shared memory segments, sockets, and files in a corrupted state. This likely explains a good deal of Windows-specific flakiness across the ecosystem. A Fast DDS patch from @MiguelCompany, which also carries its own copy of boost interprocess, resolves the shared-memory issue, and backports are already wanted for the Lyrical, Kilted, and Humble distributions. The committee is also exploring a CI plugin to clear orphaned shared memory before and after test runs. In parallel, a previously passed rolling sync policy is moving forward, with volunteers implementing a sync status flag. The new waffle triage process is reportedly working well, making a real dent in the incoming issue queue.