On Sat, 2012-02-11 at 11:07 -0800, Ken Conley wrote: ... > That interface notion is a good perspective on this. One possibility > to satisfy the various needs is to pull the share/ part of the REP as > its not fully baked. For documentation purposes, I can put it in a > Future Work section, along with a summary of the proposals around lib/ > that you and Bill have put forth. A future REP can then easily come > in and add to the specification. > > Thoughts? On somewhat related topic that has been bugging me, we have a growing need for OS specific ROS packages that are not part of the ROS build system and are capable of installing files outside of /opt without resorting to hackery. A few use cases: A package that makes GUI tools like rviz, gazebo and rx* available under the Applications menu in gnome. Scripts for starting ROS on bootup could probably be feasible without a post-install script. Keeping laptops from sleeping when the lid is closed requires modification of the system gconf defaults, and would probably be useful for robots other than the TurtleBot. System indicators and applets such as Rind [1] need to be installed in the correct location to be available. For Rind we added a 'make install' target to put things in the right place but AFAIK this won't work with rosrelease. In the short term my concern is namespace conflicts if we start packaging debians outside of the rosrelease system. Perhaps we can reserve ros--system-*.deb or ros--external-*.deb for ROS related debian packages that install outside of /opt In the long term, I would like to see rosrelease support for installing files to /etc and etc though there may be unforeseen issues with this approach. [1] http://www.ros.org/wiki/rind -- Bill Morris I Heart Engineering http://www.iheartengineering.com <3