I was waiting for more responses but I guess there are not (yet) a lot of ROS user on Arch.

Regarding a concerted effort in integrating ROS to Arch, I think for now we should proceed ad-hoc rather than try to form a group. This should be fairly effective since the ROS install stuff is on github and the Archlinux packaging stuff is mostly in AUR.

I'm concentrating my effort on fuerte and plan to create a AUR package for it once it's released. I'll try to keep my packaging stuff cloned on github.

Regarding python, hopefully ubuntu will backport a python2 link to earlier versions, which would allow ROS to follow python PEP 0394, which would more or less solve the problem. Meanwhile I link python->python2 and I have not run into any problems yet.

Traveler

On 03/15/2012 09:58 PM, Erwin José Lopez Pulgarin wrote:
I want to comment on this subject.

So it makes sense to me that automatically installing AUR packages
should NOT be done by ROS.  Thoughts?

I agree with this as well. I will comment my experience and after that propose my solution.
 
When I installed ROS in my Archlinux pc, I had several troubles with python and gcc dependencies and the instructions in ArchWiki weren't complete. After some internet search and struggling, I completed the installation and added the process to ArchWiki.

Currently one of the main problems is around GCC support, being gcc 4.6 the stable release in Archlinux, but some packages in ROS don't compile with this version; to fix this, you must install gcc 4.5 or less from AUR (but this at the same time posses troubles because from AUR, only an extra gcc installation can be installed, when installing a third gcc, for example gcc4.3 for Matlab MEX support, an error occurs). Also for python2 bindings, although AUR provides the packages, it troubles in the final implementation for the global variables and linkers, you have to fix this always manually.

The solution at the long time, that doesn't involve changing to Ubuntu, is work with the Arch community, first to create a package that install ROS and handles its dependencies internally, and latter take this to an official community package.

If this decision is made, and enough people is willing to cooperate, we can achieve this. For this an any contribution to ROS, you can count me in, I am relatively new to ROS, I am using it in my undergraduate thesis (waiting for the robotino api2 drivers), but I have experience working in open source projects and I'm always happy to help. 

--
Gracias

Erwin José López Pulgarín
Coordinador General Grupo CEIMTUN
Ingeniería Mecatrónica
Universidad Nacional de Colombia