[ros-release] Is there a reason why dependencies get broken so often with ROS packages?

[Jonathan Bohren]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 3:30 PM, Tully Foote <tfoote at osrfoundation.org>wrote:

> Can you clarify a little bit more about what you mean about conflicting
> dependencies? The only known issues have been related to upstream debian
> packages we depend upon which have changed.
>
This has been mostly with students who aren't too familiar with the way
debian package dependencies work. They try to install a new package after
not upgrading for a while, and they get errors about broken package
dependencies.

> Also if you are on shadow-fixed this is possible as we sometimes roll back
> releases in that repo.
>
Nope, this has been with the standard public repos.

> And as Mike mentioned dist-upgrade is required if there are new
> dependencies added.
>
> I don't know of anything in the ROS release system itself has nothing
> inherently causing conflicts except that it's very active with a large user
> base making many releases.
>
Yeah, I suspect that's all it is. I've recommended to people here at
Hopkins to always update their ROS packages when they see there are updates
available. This is reasonable since it's rare that a
non-backwards-compatible changes make it into stable releases.

> If you have some examples we can take a closer look at what caused them.
>
It's hard. Usually it happens when you don't run `apt-get upgrade` for a
month or two. Next time it happens I'll get more information from the
student who runs into the problem.

-j


-- 
Jonathan Bohren
Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics
http://dscl.lcsr.jhu.edu/People/JonathanBohren
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