eCAL 5.9 is coming!

[FlorianReimold]

eCAL 5.9 is coming

Hello eCAL Community,

In a few weeks we are going to release eCAL 5.9.0. The most interesting changes are:

• An awesome ecal_rec command line application, that let's you record data from command line and remote-control other eCAL recorders!
• Async Services (Some technical stuff deep inside the core that is needed by rmw_ecal. So this is the version you want to use when combining ROS2 and eCAL)
• Great improvements in eCAL Rec GUI, eCAL Sys GUI and eCAL Mon CLI

Upgrade

You shouldn't expect difficulties when upgrading from eCAL 5.8. But just in case, there is a compatibility description in our documentation. Existing software will have to be recompiled, but as the API is downwards compatible, this should always work.

If you are on Ubuntu and using our eCAL Rolling Release PPA (ecal-latest), you will be upgraded automatically. So if by any means you don't want that, you should switch to the eCAL 5.8 PPA now! (-> PPA List)

Legacy

The Release of eCAL 5.9 will also mean that eCAL 5.7 support will be dropped. But we don't think that many people will miss it. In the future the two supported eCAL versions will be eCAL 5.9 and 5.8.

And at the end a note about Ubuntu 16.04: eCAL 5.9.0 works on Ubuntu 16.04 and we will published binaries via our PPA. But we will not invest any time in keeping it compatible, as Ubuntu 16.04 isn't supported by Canonical any more. So let's just see how long there will be Ubnutu 16.04 builds.

Regards
Florian