[ros-release] Hosting .deb packages not build by buildfarm.

Tully Foote tfoote at osrfoundation.org
Tue Nov 24 02:00:11 UTC 2015


Hi Alex,

We technically have the ability to import deb packages built externally.
However, we limit the usage as much as possible to core dependencies, and
typically backports of things already in the packaging pipeline for newer
distributions.

The main reason for this is that we support many different platforms and
thus if you build only debian packages you will lock out members of the
community from installing that dependency on any other target platform.
Once it's in the upstream packaging pipeline on one platform it's
reasonable to expect it to be in the pipeline for other platforms.

Another problem we've had before is that the custom packaged dependencies
can diverge or get ahead of the upstream release process and that causes a
lot of pain when we have to make a transition to the publicly available
packages.

And lastly as you mentioned regularly updating, maintaining compatibility
becomes a big problem. If you make a change in a ROS package the buidlfarm
will automatically rebuild downstream dependencies. However if you change a
custom rolled debian package. If a non-ros dependency changes then we have
to synchronize a simultaneous rollout across all rosdistros for each layer
of our building, testing and public repositories. This can cost a week of
coordinated work, releases and buildfarm time, while requiring all other
releases to stop. As with Ubuntu or Debian this sort of breakage might be
reasonable during the prerelease stages but after a release we'd need to
have a policy of no ABI changes or else we get into the above situation.

Tully

On Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Asmodehn Shade via ros-release <
ros-release at lists.ros.org> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am having too many problems turning all my python dependencies into deb
> packages with catkin.
> So I was thinking of building deb packages using other tools.
>
> However since the point of these package is to be used by ROS packages,
> would it be feasible that I build debs package on my own, and then submit
> it to be hosted on packages.ros.org ?
> Is there some kind process for this ?
>
> Please note that these packages may change quite often.
>
> Thank you for any hint.
> --
> AlexV
>
> _______________________________________________
> ros-release mailing list
> ros-release at lists.ros.org
> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-release
>
>
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