Piyush Khandelwal and I recently used bloom to release a more
up-to-date version of libfreenect, with many important fixes that were
missing in the Ubuntu 0.2.1 version. We would like to remove it when
the upstream developers eventually release a newer version.

Now, I am belatedly trying to understand how to resolve references to
packages like this. The rosdep database resolves "libfreenect-dev" to
the Ubuntu APT packages with the same name. But, our bloom package was
released as "ros-groovy-libfreenect".

Rosdep is supposed to be ROS-distro-independent. This library is, too.
But, I don't know how to release it via the build farm under a
release-independent name.

Is there a way to do that?

Can I release "libfreenect-dev" via packages.ros.org? Or, is that a bad idea?

Should it be resolved like a ROS package, instead? It is not built
with catkin, will that be a problem? What are people building from
source supposed to do?

What is the recommended solution for 3rd-party packages like this one?
--
 joq