So Eric and I discussed this last night, and while difficult to find, it does seem that this was thought of at some point.

The Stack Version Policy (http://ros.org/wiki/StackVersionPolicy)  shows that stacks should have version numbers < 1.0 to indicate development/alpha/beta and > 1.0 to indicate stable.

Of course, this is only required to release a stack, not to get it indexed, so not every stack has it.  Perhaps making this a required tag to be indexed?  Or if not required, we could make it strongly encouraged?  Also, the version number is not very visible in the wiki documentation, so maybe increasing visibility on this would be worthwhile.

 I think that Thibault is correct in that this has been discussed before (I seem to remember it), and nothing ever happened with it.  I believe that this would be a much smaller change than writing some additional indexing system, and leans more on existing infrastructure, making it much more likely to be implemented.

~mc


On Fri, Jul 20, 2012 at 6:15 AM, Thibault Kruse <kruset@in.tum.de> wrote:
On 07/20/2012 03:38 AM, Michael Carroll wrote:

I think that much of what has been expressed is interesting.  I am particularly interested in the idea of "marking" stacks, so that people can make decisions about the amount of work involved.  

I think that the Python has a good method of doing this with the Cheese Shop (pypi.python.org), where packages are marked with tags 1-7, representing planning to mature + inactive.  They additionally have tags for other reasons, such as platform, purpose, and category.  A full list can be viewed at http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=list_classifiers

Maybe this is something that we can add to the manifest, which can be in turn added to the wiki?

I believe the idea of a ROS App Store with user ratings and comments is
not new. And since we don't have it yet, it also seems to be more effort
to create/maintain than what people are able or willing to spend.

All meta-information that is subjective or varies over time without changes
to the code should in my opinion be kept out of the sources and be either
community-maintainable or automated (such as maturity or activity).
Also I think it is also not a good idea to declare stack maintainers
in the manifest (kudos to main contributors are fine).

I personally like using websites like Ohloh and freecode (aka freshmeat.net)
https://freecode.com/
where the community can go wild in maintaining meta information, rating and
commenting, and where there are also some automated reports.

Both ohloh and freecode allow the community to add projects, so
there is no need to wait for stack maintainers to do it if you feel a
stack should be tracked online. The "ros" tag is unused in both ohloh
and freecode, so for now we can use that tag to have some kind of
subspace.


For those who are interested, I also recommend to glance at how the
Apache and Eclipse foundations domesticate wild projects using e.g.
Incubator phases:
http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html
http://www.eclipse.org/projects/dev_process/development_process_2011.php#6_Development_Process


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Michael Carroll
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