* William Woodall <william@osrfoundation.org> [2015-04-22 15:12]:
> At the end of the day, we're looking for someone to take responsibility for
> it, no matter how it is distributed. So to me the distribution mechanism is
> up for discussion.

Ok, before this is getting philosophical, here you go (took me like 5min ;) ):

https://launchpad.net/~v-launchpad-jochen-sprickerhof-de/+archive/ubuntu/for-ros

> On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Jochen Sprickerhof via ros-users <
> ros-users@lists.ros.org> wrote:
> I don't see a good reason for us to duplicate the functionality of PPA's.
> I'm not experienced using them (PPA's), is there a compelling reason not to
> use them?

In theory, you can provide updated versions of packages through
packages.ros.org, would wouldn't be available to compile against on the
PPA. But basically PPAs are not much more than outobuilders, so actually
you do provide the functionality of it already only with a different
interface.

> We provide REP-136 for this: http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0136.html

Sorry, but that's by far not as powerfull as debhelper or other
packaging systems. Also, I really think we should not duplicate already
existing packaging tools. 

> On a side note, what do you need a dput interface for? I guess uploading
> hand crafted debs?

And source debs, that's how it's usually done.

> > I guess we would only need to relax some of
> > the awakward bloom assumptions in there.
> 
> Can you explain what you mean? The output of bloom can be built (is built)
> with git-buildpackage and though by default it installs into a ROS prefix
> of `/opt/ros/<rosdistro>` it can be used to make debs that go into `/usr`
> as well.

Martin and I have looked into pushing normal git-buildpackge repos into
the ROS autobuilders, but from the code it looked like there where quite
some places where it assumes a bloom generated one. I haven't tried it
though.

Cheers Jochen