The RoboStack monorepo

All maintained ROS distributions in RoboStack are built from one repository: RoboStack/robostack.

That wasn’t always the case. Before 2026 Okt, every distribution had its own repository: ros-humble, ros-jazzy, ros-lyrical, ros-rolling and so on. A fix for a broken package often had to be made four times, in four repositories, with four CI setups that slowly drifted apart. Keeping all of that in sync took more maintainer time than building the packages themselves. So in 2026 the maintained distributions moved into one repository.

How the monorepo is organized

Each distribution has its own folder in distros/<distro>/ for what is specific to it, and everything the distributions have in common lives in shared/. A patch, a test or a dependency fix that applies to all distributions is made once. New ROS distributions are added as a new folder in the same repository.

The distributions that moved in were:

Distribution	Recipes
Humble	distros/humble
Jazzy	distros/jazzy
Lyrical	distros/lyrical
Rolling	distros/rolling

The move was driven by Tobias Fischer, with a lot of review from Silvio Traversaro. The plan is documented in this issue.

Package names

Packages built from the monorepo are named ros2-<package>, for example ros2-desktop. The distribution comes from the channel you install from. Every one of them also has a ros-<distro>-<package> package that points to it, so older instructions like pixi add ros-jazzy-desktop keep working.

Reporting an issue or requesting a package

Open an issue in RoboStack/robostack and mention which distribution you are using.

Missing a package? Open a package request there. robostack-bot opens the pull request that adds it to the build, and a maintainer reviews it.

Building packages locally

Clone the monorepo and run the tasks for the distribution you want to work on:

git clone https://github.com/RoboStack/robostack.git
cd robostack
pixi run rs jazzy build

The README explains the layout and the other tasks.

Deprecated distributions

Noetic, Kilted, Galactic and Foxy were not moved into the monorepo and are deprecated. Their packages stay installable from their channels, but they don’t get new builds or fixes. Their repositories are kept for reference:

Distribution	Repository
Noetic	RoboStack/ros-noetic
Kilted	RoboStack/ros-kilted
Galactic	RoboStack/ros-galactic
Foxy	RoboStack/ros-foxy

If you are on one of these, move to a distribution that is built from the monorepo. With Pixi that is mostly changing the channel and the package prefix in your pixi.toml.

Questions? Ask them in the robotics channel on the prefix.dev Discord or join the monthly community meeting.