Thanks everyone for your feedback to my idea. There's a lot of good conversation here. The conversation has strayed a little bit from my original idea of ways to find common holes in the ROS package coverage. My experience with Uservoice was on a much smaller project, and I agree it probably won't scale well. However, in response to Thomas's comment, I think you and I have both have had experience with spending time on a personal need for a package (pr2_python), only to discover that other people needed it and were working on it. I'd love to see a solution to that problem that got people developing for ROS at different sites communicating more and theoretically collaborating more. As for the bigger problem of maintaining the wild ROS packages: I echo Jonathan's sentiment about contributing to others' stacks being painful at times. The fact is, for better and for worse, the ROS.org wiki hierarchy is very flat. This means on the plus side that everyone is able to contribute on equal standing. The downside is that, beyond self-created stacks, there is no categorization of packages. That means A) There is no central repository for all arm_navigation packages (for example) (other than search, which isn't wonderfully functional) B) There is no way to rate packages/stacks (as has been discussed above) I think there might be a suitable underused feature from the wiki in the category feature. Wikipedia allows for easier browsing by looking up categories of articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Robotics_companies). This could be tied to the answers.ros.org tagging feature in some way as well. It would be nice to do a search for MappingAlgorithms and Stable. I also approve of using statistics to differentiate the various stacks. I was actually thinking about this previous to this discussion, resulting in my work with manifest_cleaner (http://ros.org/wiki/manifest_cleaner) and my recent question about the ROS.org indexer (http://answers.ros.org/question/39049/ros-wiki-indexer/) -David!! On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Bill Morris wrote: > On Fri, 2012-07-20 at 09:05 +0200, Jonathan Bohren wrote: >> On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 2:00 AM, Geoffrey >> Biggs wrote: > > ... > >> ROS is old enough now that there are a lot of packages, even >> wg-spawned packages, whose owners have moved on to other things. I'm >> talking from experience on this, since I recently tried to fix what I >> considered a serious flaw in a wg-hosted package, only to find that >> the names listed in the package manifest are no longer the maintainers >> and the person listed in the stack manifest is (understandably) too >> busy to deal with my patch. I find myself blocked, and I could fork >> it, but this package is currently distributed with the debian packages >> and I think creating a new package with a new name will just lead to >> confusion and fragmentation. > > I have had similar experiences waiting for patches to land. > > For part of this, I think there needs to be a clearer process for > gaining commit access or forking for "core" ros packages. > > While it doesn't solve the documentation issue, Debian has an > interesting approach with the idea of a "Request for adoption" > http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/ > http://wnpp.debian.net/ > > Perhaps another approach would be for maintainers to avoid/remove > namespace conflicts for unmaintained packages. ie. linefollower -> > mylab_linefollower > -- > Bill Morris > I Heart Engineering > http://www.iheartengineering.com > <3 > > _______________________________________________ > ros-users mailing list > ros-users@code.ros.org > https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users >