[ros-release] p2os Maintenance status

[Aris Synodinos]

Hi,

I have just recently sent the following(cited) email about the maintenance
status of p2os, but since I was not a member of the list, the email has not
been made public. I am therefore forwarding the email again, hoping that
you will not receive it twice. Just yesterday the maintainer of p2os pushed
a new commit to the p2os package, which is however mostly unmaintained and
old (no rqt - no ros_control - no simulation etc). I have contacted the
ros-sig-pioneer mailing list as you can see in the previous email and we
want to not mix things up for the community.

Currently there are two drivers for pioneer robots, rosaria and p2os.
Rosaria is actively maintained by the members of ros-sig-pioneer and uses
libaria to communicate with the robots. P2os however, which dates back to
the stage driver, has been left without proper ros support for a long time,
with no major upgrade ever since electric. Hunter Allen used a part of
Dereck Wonnacott's work ( https://github.com/dawonn/ros-p2os-driver )  and
ported p2os to groovy, using bloom for releasing the code with debs.

The problem is that H. Allen is not updating the driver (very little
support) and due to the fact that he has released the driver with the p2os
package name, no one else can take ownership/maintainership without causing
unnecessary confusion to the community. The result is very poor support for
p2os, (until yesterday there were no install targets for p2os, so the deb
packages were empty) and outdated support (groovy). I have tried contacting
H. Allen about stepping up to the job, but he closed the issue without
responding.

What is the proper way to proceed? Is it preferable to release a new
package under a different name? I will upload my code publicly on github as
soon as this is resolved, under the same (p2os) or a different name if that
is requested. Currently, my code is in a private bitbucket repository.

Regards,
Aris


On Sun, May 25, 2014 at 10:30 AM, Aris Synodinos <asynodin at mech.upatras.gr>
wrote:

> After contacting the ros-sig-pioneer mailing list, and since the previous
> maintainer is unfortunately not responding and has stopped maintaining the
> p2os package, I am willing to step up and claim maintainership of the
> package.
>
> I have fixed the issues that exist for groovy (no install directives in
> cmake making the debian package unusable), added features in hydro (moveit
> integration, rqt_dashboard etc) and am willing to continue maintaining it
> for future versions (indigo etc).
>
> Please inform me how to proceed for this to happen. Currently I have
> published all my work in a private repo in bitbucket so as not to cause
> confusion to the community, but of course I will publish this in github
> when this is desirable.
>
> Here is the issue I created for the maintainership status in github:
> https://github.com/allenh1/p2os/issues/14
>
> Here is the mail in the ros-sig-pioneer mailing list:
>
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/ros-sig-pioneer/GVe3IQUn7cU
>
> --
> Aris Synodinos
> PhD Student
> Robotics Grouphttps://github.com/dawonn/ros-p2os-driver
> Mechanical and Aeronautics Engineering Department
> Tel. +30-2610-996248
> e-mail: asynodin at mech.upatras.gr
> Web: http://robotics.mech.upatras.gr/
>



-- 
Aris Synodinos
PhD Student
Robotics Group
Mechanical and Aeronautics Engineering Department
Tel. +30-2610-996248
e-mail: asynodin at mech.upatras.gr
Web: http://robotics.mech.upatras.gr/
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