On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 4:55 AM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I was looking through the list of suggested topics on the gsoc page[1]
and ran into this one:

"Develop ROS independent library for system dependency resolution"

I was wondering if I could maybe have some more information on this. For
instance, is the end goal something like "packagekit"[2], that can sit
on top of the various package managers and make system libraries easier
to install?

Yes the role of the proposed tool is something like Packagekit.

Packagekit doesn't have it's own dep solver, it just calls
the various package managers in it's back-end and lets them do their
thing.

This is the case for rosdep too, except for in the case of inter package manager dependencies. For instance, the order in which you install packages from pip and homebrew matters on OS X. Therefore the tool would need to calculate the dep graph between the dependencies and call pip and homebrew in an interleaved fashion.

See: https://github.com/ros/rosdep/pull/3

Quoting the website: "Formally, PackageKit is a D-Bus abstraction
layer that allows the session user to manage packages in a secure way
using a cross-distro, cross-architecture API." From the description of
the gsoc project, a lot of work seems to already have been done in
packagekit. (There's a command line packagekit client too, it isn't just
a GUI)

I think the reliance on D-Bus might actually be a limitation here. It is possible that Packagekit could be part of the solution, but it obviously doesn't extend to Homebrew or Macports on OS X nor does it integrate with pip or gem.

I'm a fedora package maintainer, part of the fedora robotics sig and
have been assisting Rich Mattes with packaging Fuerte for Fedora. I'm
currently reviewing the packages he puts up. I'm therefore aware of some
of the challenges that need to be overcome to get ROS easily deployed on
$random_distro. I'm a masters by research student at the University of
Technology, Sydney. I'm using ROS for my research which uses the PR2 as
a platform (hence my interest in ROS). My research is to do with
navigation, where I focus on biological inspired navigation (head
cells/place cells/continuous attractor neural networks and the sort)

Thanks for your interest! Moving forward, I believe you need to submit a proposal through the GSoC website and introduce yourself on the OSRF GSoC mailing list which Stephen linked.

[1] http://wiki.osrfoundation.org/gsoc13
[2] http://www.packagekit.org/pk-intro.html
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Thanks,
Warm regards,
Ankur: "FranciscoD"

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