[Ros-release] Please update for Oneiric and other minor notes

[Ken Conley]

Hi all,

Thanks for joining this list.  In the past we haven't communicated as
often as we should due to not wanting to 'spam' the ros-users list.
This list will enable more direct communication and hopefully have you
better prepared for issues as they arise.

Summary:

 1. Oneiric support, please update
 2. Unstable is 'unstable'
 3. Standalone messages
 4. New release scripts for unstable/Fuerte coming

== Oneiric support, please update ==

We have just updated to Oneiric support, which means there is one
important item:

 ** Please upgrade your ros-electric debian packages and your release scripts **

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-electric-ros
roscd ros_release
svn up

There are still releases being made without Oneiric rosdep entries;
the fixes above will give you release the best chance at being Oneiric
compatible.  We have ideas on how to improve this for Fuerte, but now
a manual update is required.

== Unstable is 'unstable ==

The second update I wished to communicate is that *unstable is
currently 'unstable'*.  Your prereleases are unlikely to work there
for now, so you can circumvent the normal rules and release directly
into electric if your prereleases pass.

In order to find potential regressions related to deprecated features,
we have aggressively pulled those features from unstable.  The biggest
change is that we are pulling support for the tinyxml, eigen, opencv2,
and yaml_cpp ROS packages as planned.  You have to update your
CMakeLists.txt file to link against these as you would a normal system
dependency.  Their respective ROS wiki pages contain instructions.

We are making a continued push towards using system dependencies
wherever possible, which we believe improves the portability of code
(i.e. with and w/o ROS packaging).

We are also prepping the new 'ros' stack, which will look much more
like a system dependency itself.  We haven't fully integrated the
debian packaging for this new system yet, so you may have to manually
install the Python libraries using easy_install or pip in the interim.
 The affected libraries are rospkg, rosdep2, genmsg, genpy, gencpp,
and genlisp -- if you see an ImportError for those, the way to resolve
is:

pip install -U <library-name>

== Standalone C++ messages ==

The third update is that we are making a big push to make roscpp
messages 'standalone', i.e. create a minimal-dependency data structure
header library that you can easily use in your libraries without
depending on roscpp itself.  The hope is to allow these messages to be
installed as system dependencies so that you can add them to your
include path using standard build tools.  This is a rather big change,
but is also a major component of enabling code to be more portable.
There will be a lot of instability on unstable as we work out the
kinks of getting this in place.

== New release scripts for unstable/fuerte ==

We are working on new release scripts for unstable/fuerte.  These new
release scripts will be pip/easy_install based, so they will be much
easier for you to manage.  Unfortunately these scripts are not
currently planned to be backwards compatible, so you will still have
to use the old release scripts for Electric and previous.

 - Ken