Hi Leopold,

I am a Debian user as well and share your concerns. Part of the problem
is, that ROS is trying to be a lot of different things (upstream
development, build system, dependency management system, packaging
system, package repository, cross platform) and by this it's duplicating
a lot of features that are actually provided by Debian/Ubuntu. The other
problem is, that the Ubuntu support is so good, that for most of us it's
easier to just install an Ubuntu release instead of working on the
packages.

I think in the long run we have two possible ways to go. Either we
continue to maintain ROS as a add-on to Ubuntu or we repackage it
according to the packaging guidelines. This doesn't need to be an
exclusive or, a possible way would be to stabilize the core components
first (i.e. move them to right places according to the FHS, add proper
sonames, split the packages, fix dependencies..) and integrate them into
Debian, so we could still use the old tools later. Once we have them in
Debian/Ubuntu maintaining the rest should be a lot easier.

Groovy and catkin are definitely a step in the right direction but there
is still a lot of work to be done and I don't think we can manage this
without support from the core ROS developers, or we would duplicate a lot
of work.

Cheers Jochen