This has been a bit counter intuitive since a lot of users had the impression that a packages was not available in a newer ROS distribution when that tab was missing on the wiki page.

(While this could have been easily resolved by adding a "doc" entry for that repository in the rosdistro distribution file it is a common case that the "doc" entry is missing.)

As of now the distribution tab appears also for released packages which do not have a documentation job.

That will allow users to immediately see if a package is available in a specific ROS distribution.

An example of this is the cmake_modules package: http://wiki.ros.org/cmake_modules

Before it did not have an "indigo" tab giving the user the impression that it had not yet been released for "indigo".

Now that tab exists and shows some minimal package information.

Please notice that it does neither contain any repository information nor a link to the code API (and many more details).

While this will hopefully help to get a better impression about the availability of a package it does not make the doc jobs obsolete.

In order to show the full package header as well as API docs each maintainer should still register the repository for documentation generation (http://wiki.ros.org/Get%20Involved#Indexing_Your_.2A-ros-pkg_Repository_for_Documentation_Generation).

Cheers,

- Dirk