Hi,

As we are preparing for the upcoming Jade release we've identified Openni2
as a dependency of commonly used sensors which is unavailable from Ubuntu
and needs to be packaged for Utopic and Vivid.

Up until Trusty we have been pulling it from the PCL PPA [1] with the PCL
packages. However that PPA is being retired as PCL has been included
upstream. [2]

Openni2 is also in the process of being submitted upstream to Debian [3][4]
and from there it will propagate to Ubuntu. But for now it's not available
on the Ubuntu distributions Utopic and Vivid.

We'd like to ask that someone in the ROS community who uses Openni2 would
be willing to setup a PPA on Launchpad and maintain a backport of the
packages for Ubuntu until it is included upstream. It should mostly be a
matter of taking [3] and checking for any differences between the Ubuntu
and Debian packaging and uploading it to a Launchpad PPA. After
verification and testing the resultant packages can then be imported into
the ROS repositories to be made available to all ROS users.

Tully


[1]
https://launchpad.net/~v-launchpad-jochen-sprickerhof-de/+archive/ubuntu/pcl
[2] http://packages.ubuntu.com/vivid/libpcl-dev
[3] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-multimedia/openni2.git/
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=707056