[Ros-release] rosdoc_lite branches and Hydro documentation

[Dirk Thomas]

The branching policy of a ROS package as well as a pure Python package is determined by the maintainer.
For ROS packages there are two common options:
  * creating separate branches for each distro
  * keeping a single master from where a release is made into all distros
  * (or sometimes even a mix: separate branches for Fuerte and Groovy but Hydro uses Groovy since there are no changes between those two)

For ROS distro independent releases there is commonly only one master branch.

rosdoc_lite is a mixture of both.
It needs two different branches for Fuerte (old logic) and Groovy/Hydro (new logic).
The buildfarm checks out the respective branch and uses rosdoc_lite from source (as far as I know).

Adding the Groovy branch to the Hydro doc.yaml is the right way for this.
Just creating a Hydro branch for the sake of have that name creates unnecessary overhead.

I am not sure why rosdoc_lite is at all released as a ROS Debian package.
That decision backdates to the time where Eitan / Wim worked on these tools.

With the EOL of Fuerte coming soon we might want to consider removing the ROS distro specific package, unlisting it from the distro files including doc.
We could than either release it as a ROS distro agnostic pure Python package and deploy that on the farm using puppet or just keep it as it is and checkout the repo on the farm.

- Dirk


On 27.07.2013 10:12, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> I noticed that rosdoc_lite does not document itself on Hydro, and thought: "I'll just add it to the Hydro doc.yaml in rosdistro".
>
> Then I noticed there is no hydro-devel branch, although the groovy-devel branch has been released to Hydro. I can add that branch to the Hydro doc.yaml, but it feels screwy, so I thought I'd better ask.
>
> It appears that Jenkins checks out the groovy-devel branch from source when running the Hydro wiki doc update jobs. Why doesn't it install the ros-hydro-rosdoc-lite Debian package?
>
> Do we really want per-distro sources for a ros-infrastructure package like this? Aren't they intended to be distro-independent? The only Hydro package ros-hydro-rosdoc-lite depends on is
> ros-hydro-genmsg, which in turn depends on catkin. Maybe that explains the oddity, but I don't quite understand what's going on, or the reasons behind it. Genmsg also has a groovy-devel branch, but no
> hydro-devel.
>
> I offered to help maintain rosdoc_lite, but can't get my mind around how it is supposed to fit in.
>
> So, what is the branching and release policy for ros-infrastructure packages?
>
> --
>
>   joq
>
>
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