ROS 2 rolling sync policy gets approved by PMC

The ROS PMC formally approved a new rolling sync policy via asynchronous vote, passing with 11 of 16 members approving under Charter Article 4.12.ii. The change enables manual holds on automatic syncs and introduces a new rosdistro flag in index-v4.yaml to block syncs for distributions, supporting automatic lifecycle management. Long-term, this could tie into a “distro is frozen” field to stop syncs for end-of-life distributions automatically.

Buildfarm maintainers also discussed greenness issues, with Lyrical showing poor job completion rates (32%) compared to Rolling, despite comparable jobs. Flaky tests like test_tracetools.test_message_link_partial_sync (timing out after 60 seconds instead of 2) and missing bool includes in RMW packages causing widespread regressions were flagged for fixes. Priorities include resolving test name collisions in JUnit data and improving flaky test detection.