On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 3:36 AM, Jürgen Sturm
<sturm@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
> Hi Jack, Ken,
>
> I was thinking about the same problem for the package list on ROS.org
> and our ALUFR-ROS-PKG repository. I think that it is good practice to
> place unfinished or only partially working packages in a sandbox
> folder, and not to index them (or at least mark them as
> "sandbox/unstable" on ROS.org.

That is what we do, too. When a package is working and has at least
minimal documentation, it gets promoted to trunk, where it
automatically gets picked up for the packages listing. Seems to work
OK.

> Regarding the sheer number of packages that will appear for ROS in the
> next years, I think that a good solution would be to somehow compute
> some automatically extracted features that help users to find/sort
> packages more easily. May I propose the following features to be added
> to the package list (and the package wiki page):
>
> 1. last commit date (or time since last commit)
> 2a. number of other packages that depend on this package
> 2b. latest commit date of dependent packages
> 3a. number of packages that depend on this package from other institutions
> 3b. latest commit date of dependent packages from other institutions
>
> This list is not complete, but this would help me to recognize how old
> packages are, how well maintained, and how useful.

Good idea.

4. existence of some documentation tied to the package (i.e. does the
<url> in the manifest actually go somewhere?)

That would save a lot of searching through non-reusable code all by itself.
-- 
 joq