[IMPORTANT] Merging Autoware-AI Community and Autoware Core/Universe Community

[mitsudome-r]

Background

Recently, I have been talking with the Board of Directors and TSC members of AWF about improving Autoware developers' community. I currently feel that we have diverged communities for Autoware-AI and Autoware Core/Universe, which is very inefficient. In this post, I would like to propose some approaches to solve the issue and would like to have everyone's feedback.

Current Issues

Some of the key issues include:

• Many people see Autoware-AI as the main code and are unaware of Autoware Core/Universe (or Autoware.Auto)
  • Autoware-AI will reach to EOL by the end of 2022,
  • We need to make sure that the all users can transition to Autoware Core/Universe smoothly.
• Autoware-AI and Autoware Core/Universe repositories maintained in different Github organization
  • I hear many feedback saying having multiple repositories and organization is confusing
  • Having multiple platforms makes making announcement to the community more complex. For example, I have to post this discussion thread and also post a similar issue in Autoware-AI to make announcements to catch attention of both users.

Proposal and call for cooporation

In order to solve the issue I propose the following approach:

1. Improve brand recognition of Autoware Core/Universe
In order to do this, we need to improve Autoware Universe/Core repositories by:

• Improving the Web pages of autoware.org (This is on-going with AWF SPC)
• posting information about Autoware on blogs/web articles/SNS
• Providing more demonstrations to attract people
• Improving documentation, such as preparing a better quickstart and detailed walk-through of features.

I really would like to have help from all the members from the community to improve both documentation and code base of Autoware Core/Universe. For the details please see
(Improvement of Autoware's Brand Recognition.pdf)

2. Merge the Github organization and meta-repositories
To merge Github organizations, I have been discussing with the Board members and software architects of AWF about the plan. Currently, we are thinking of doing it by:
Phase 1: Put links to Autoware Core/Universe in the README of Autoware-AI and also post information about this migration plan
Phase 2: Transferring all core repositories from Autoware-AI to Autoware Foundation to unify the organization
Phase 3: Archiving Autoware-AI repositories after reaching EOL
Repository Merging Plan.pdf contains more details with diagrams of the plan.

For this merging plan, any feedback/suggestions are welcome so that there would be minimal the impact to the users/developers of Autoware. I will be checking this thread until Friday, June 3, 2022 for the feedback.

[samehmohamed88]

@mitsudome-r as someone who recently discovered Autoware Core/Universe, I strongly agree that there is a big confusion here. I knew of Autoware.Auto on Gitlab from previous years, and when I wanted to take a closer look last month, I went there first.

I only happened to find the Github org by coincidence, and my immediate question was why are there commits to both code bases; I later found out about the Cargo ODD and F1Tenth.

Another big issue for me was the README's of all new Core/Universe Github repos have the same cryptic message about the decision to move from Gitlab to Github. I think this must change because developer/community expectation is the README is a full first step before visiting the github.io doc pages.

Yet another issue is the Tier IV org and why some common ros2 messages are still there. I understand in the .repos there's a comment that they will be moved to Autoware Foundation org, however there are still several repos that are in Tier IV org, which I myself find confusing and unclear who has what responsibility.

Yet another issue is the Apex.AI YouTube course. While it's a good intro to the software stack of SDC's and Autoware itself, it references Gitlab, uses outdated ade tool, simulation is based on LGV which is no longer supported in Core/Universe, and when I look at the AWF members list I don't even see Apex.AI anymore. Looking closer at their website I see that they no longer provide a product around Autoware.Auto!

Finally, to be perfectly honest, my own personal history with Autoware has lead me to dismiss it time and time again. From autoware.ai to autoware.auto confusion, to the many problems I faced when trying to contribute to Autoware.Auto on Gitlab, to yet another switch to Core/Universe and the outdated course on YouTube.

This is supposed to be Self-Driving Car software, perhaps the most important and challenging problem of this generation. It's difficult to take Autoware seriously with all of the inconsistencies.

Perhaps most troubling is that while Autoware is open source, it seems that only a few Foundation members are actively contributing, and that leads to confusion about the different members like Tier IV, and if there are competing interests.

On a positive note, the discord community is a great resource to find help, and the fact that Zoom meetings are open to the public is a great positive step. I don't think any other open source self-driving project has this, which makes this project truly unique, and makes an individual developer feel that contribution is welcome.

[mitsudome-r]

Regarding the merging of Github organization and repositories, I have mentioned in the PDF that it will be done within 2-3 months, but I've got a feedback from the BoD that we should do it faster. The major reason is that the longer we have multiple organization, more confusion we have to the community. I think they have a good point, and if there are no negative feedback on speeding up the process, I will start working on it after I wait for further feedback until the end of this week.

[ghost]

@mitsudome-r Apologies for the delayed response to this discussion. I was wondering if there are any plans to migrate Autoware.Auto to GitHub as well, so that all Autoware versions are within the same organization in the same place?

[mitsudome-r]

We do have intention of migrating some of the Autoware.Auto packages to Autoware Core/Universe repositories, but he still haven't planned out the detailed plan.

Currently, I'm not thinking of doing the direct port of Autoware.Auto into Autoware Core/Universe. There are some packages without the original author or unused packages in Autoware.Auto, and I think we should first have a review on which packages are worth porting. As far as I know, most of the features that was supported in Autoware.Auto should be available in Autoware Core/Universe, but there are some missing features, especially for racing ODD, and I have asked @HaoruXue to start porting some of the packages for racing features (starting with record replay planner). Also, if there are packages with better implementation or better performance in Autoware.Auto that can replace the one made by TIER IV, we can always replace them, but unfortunately we lack resources on doing that right now.

Could you share If you have any particular features that you want from Autoware.Auto?

[mitsudome-r]

The merging was done last week and we now have a single Autoware repository to contain:

• main branch that contains repos files for core/universe
• autoware-ai branch that contains repos files for Autoware.AI

I have also transferred all the discussions and issues.
This has caused the change in issue id and discussion id, and if you have any links to issues/discussions for old repository, you might end up seeing a different issue/discussion with the same id in the merged repository.
To solve this, replace autoware in the link with autoware_core_universe_prototype to find the correct issue.

example:
Replace
https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware/discussions/38
with
https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware_core_universe_prototype/discussions/38

[mitsudome-r]

I have archived autoware_ai_* repositories to stop further PR/Issue creation to the repository.
I will also create autoware_ai meta archive repository and remove all autoware_ai related branches from main Autoware repo https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware.