Hi,
I have just recently sent the following(cited) email about the maintenance status of p2os, but since I was not a member of the list, the email has not been made public. I am therefore forwarding the email again, hoping that you will not receive it twice. Just yesterday the maintainer of p2os pushed a new commit to the p2os package, which is however mostly unmaintained and old (no rqt - no ros_control - no simulation etc). I have contacted the ros-sig-pioneer mailing list as you can see in the previous email and we want to not mix things up for the community.
Currently there are two drivers for pioneer robots, rosaria and p2os. Rosaria is actively maintained by the members of ros-sig-pioneer and uses libaria to communicate with the robots. P2os however, which dates back to the stage driver, has been left without proper ros support for a long time, with no major upgrade ever since electric. Hunter Allen used a part of Dereck Wonnacott's work ( https://github.com/dawonn/ros-p2os-driver ) and ported p2os to groovy, using bloom for releasing the code with debs.
The problem is that H. Allen is not updating the driver (very little support) and due to the fact that he has released the driver with the p2os package name, no one else can take ownership/maintainership without causing unnecessary confusion to the community. The result is very poor support for p2os, (until yesterday there were no install targets for p2os, so the deb packages were empty) and outdated support (groovy). I have tried contacting H. Allen about stepping up to the job, but he closed the issue without responding.
What is the proper way to proceed? Is it preferable to release a new package under a different name? I will upload my code publicly on github as soon as this is resolved, under the same (p2os) or a different name if that is requested. Currently, my code is in a private bitbucket repository.
Regards,
Aris