I am currently working on catkin and trying to get it in shape for a review.
I am looking for a clean wet-only solution - and on-top of that add necessary stuff for backward compatibility with the dry world.

A new REP would be a very good idea - I would prepare one as soon as I have a thorough understanding of all details and a prototype with the necessary changes.
It would if course be very welcome if you, Jack, (or anybody else) would put together a REP earlier.

The most important issues currently are:
- build-space should be equally usable as install-space (potentially chaining multiple of them without the need to install)
- FHS compliance
- catkin has no notion of a packages anymore (manifests only exist for backward compatibility), missing information must be ported from manifest.xml to stack.xml
- a lot of tools are not working well with the wet world (i.e. rosdep)

Some comments regarding FHS compliance:
Binaries of stacks can be installed in one of the following three locations to conform with the standard:
- lib/STACK-NAME/libexec
   looks like the most preferable solution
- libexec/STACK-NAME
   does not exist on several platform, which make it look weird
- bin
   not favorable since subfolders are not allowed in here

I agree that a tool like roscreate-stack should be created for the next release.

- Dirk


On 24.07.2012 07:35, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> We need to resolve some fundamental build and filesystem layout issues
> in time for Groovy.
>
> There are basic problems with REP-0122 that we were not able to fix in
> time for Fuerte. To me, the biggest issue is placing binary files
> under the "share" directory. But, there are others mentioned in the
> REP, itself:
>
>   http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0122.html#future-work
>
> Should we update that REP or create a new one to amend it? (If no one
> else has time to work on it, I am willing to document any agreed
> changes.) I suggest a brief discussion here (to get wider input), with
> follow-up details resolved on the ros-sig-buildsystem list.
>
> Please read that REP and respond with your comments and suggestions.
>