2012/9/25 Michael Janssen (CS Grad) <mjanssen@cs.umn.edu>

> So, the installation instructions for installing Fuerte on Debian have
> been out of date for a little while now; They don't work
> out-of-the-box for sure, and I've been trying to figure out how to
> make them a bit better.
>

Hi,

I was one of the Debian users that tried to keep ROS working on Debian, but
I'm now with electric and not willing to change before a quite long time.
I'm not surprised that the information are a bit outdated.
I'm unfortunately not capable to help to improve this. The only this I have
done was to update the documentation between cturtle, diamondback and
electric and sending trac tickets to have rosdeps.yaml files updated.

 I will stay with electric for quite a long time now, so I'm sorry to say
that I will not be available for testing purpose :(


> PIP is suggested as part of the first thing to get the rosinstall,
> rospkg, and rosdep tools.  This has been [disrecommended on this
> list][1] for about a month.  The recommended way is to use apt now,
> but there aren't any instructions on the [Debian Fuerte install
> page][2] for that.  I would like to remedy this.
>
> The packages installed via pip are rosinstall, rospkg, rosdep, and
> vcstools.  They are available in the ubuntu repository at
> http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu/
>
> Lucky for us, python is nice and cross plaform, and Ubuntu packages
> are compatible with Debian, and none of these packages have
> dependencies outside this set, so they install fine with dpkg if you
> download them all and put them on one line. python-vcstools and
> python-rosinstall depend on bzr, which isn't included in the
> "bootstrap dependencies" earlier in the wiki document, but 'apt-get
> install bzr' remedies that situation.
>
> From here on out, the install instructions work fine, installing from
> source.  However, I would prefer to have a completely Debian-package
> based install, similar to the Ubuntu install.  Most of the packages
> and all of the package tools are shared between Ubuntu and Debian.
> Using the fuerte.yaml from [the rosdistro page][3] and the fact that
> we've already installed python-yaml from the earlier steps, we can
> build Debian packages automatically for the entire underlay.  Using
> the "precise" tags that are the most recent work fine on both Debian
> squeeze and sid.  I haven't been able to test on wheezy yet, but I
> suspect it works fine there as well.
>
> The attached script should take a Debian system from nothing to a
> working ros-underlay install (ready to start at step 1.3.2 on the
> [installation page][2]), with all Debian packages instead of source.
> I've tested it on current (2012-09-24) squeeze and sid.
>
> My next step is to contribute some rosdep rules, I think.  Right now I
> have a branch at http://github.com/jamuraa/rosdep (in accordance with
> the [instructions pointed at by Tully][4]) and have been updating it.
> Right now I am stuck at packages in two states: packages like pcl and
> ros which have their own packages built for Ubuntu (and therefore
> should not be handled through rosdep?) or sets of missing resources
> like this:
>
> runtime_monitor: Missing resource rxbag
> turtle_actionlib: Missing resource turtlesim
> smach_viewer: Missing resource xdot
>
> There are a [couple][5] of [questions][6] on answers.ros.org, but they
> aren't getting much attention / answers.  If someone else has tried
> this and has some advise / tips, or wants to point me in the right
> direction for setting up a build server, I'd be grateful.
>
> [1]: http://code.ros.org/lurker/attach/3@20120806.010403.409c5c22.attach
> [2]: http://www.ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Installation/Debian
> [3]: https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/raw/master/releases/fuerte.yaml
> [4]: http://ros.org/doc/api/rosdep2/html/contributing_rules.html
> [5]:
> http://answers.ros.org/question/44070/contributing-rosdep-rules-for-debian/
> [6]:
> http://answers.ros.org/question/33002/rosdep-install-a-fails-on-debian-sqeeze/
>
> Michael Janssen --- mjanssen@cs.umn.edu
> Center for Distributed Robotics --- University of Minnesota
>
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