[Ros-release] Wet Prereleases

[Daniel Stonier]

On 15 February 2013 14:43, Marcus Liebhardt <marcus.liebhardt at yujinrobot.com
> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Daniel Stonier <d.stonier at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> I recently spent quite a bit of time catkin bugfixing inbetween a
>> successful pre-release and a successful release, so I thought I'd post some
>> feedback.
>>
>> Previously, one important part of pre-releasing was catching stack
>> dependency bugs. Wet pre-releases on the other hand, let through alot of
>> dependency bugs that are only found in the actual release. I believe the
>> cause is due to the fact that the pre-release runs catkin on the whole
>> stack, whereas the release works on individual packages.
>>
>> In a pre-release a missing package dependency (e.g. you used
>> geometry_msgs/Pose.h, but didn't include geometry_msgs in the package.xml)
>> sometimes gets installed by another unrelated package in the stack which,
>> just by chance, also happened to use it and did include it in the
>> package.xml correctly... and no error results. On the build farm, where it
>> builds packages independantly, you get a fail.
>>
>> These fails also happen in other ways - e.g. a missing
>> find_package(catkin REQUIRED ...) in just one package in the stack also
>> gets past pre-release.
>>
>> I know that once you're familiar with the development process, these
>> problems are not so common. In this case, however, I had someone new trying
>> on the catkin release process, and the 12-24 hr delay ping-ponging back and
>> forth between trying a release, bugfixing it and trying again meant broken
>> packages for a considerable period of time.
>>
>> Also as a result - it rather feels that the pre-release isn't doing much
>> more for me than a compile check that I can do on my own machine.
>>
>
> Didn't you forget to mentioned:
> "I hate Catkin!"?
> ;-)
>
>
I love catkin except the teething issues... I suppose the hate should
properly be redirected at bleeding edge software, at which point you should
perhaps redirect it at yourself for sitting on the edge if you don't want
to be!

I'm happing sitting on the edge at the moment though, this edge we need. So
the above is indented as feedback more than a complaint.
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