[ros-release] proposal for changing the installation page on the wiki

[William Woodall]

That organization scheme looks nice to me :).

Some comments:

- It would be nice to have a fallback for when a platform doesn't have
installation rules for a particular ROS distro. For example, on Gentoo if
you click Indigo, there is nothing, but it would be nice to have message
letting users know that a newer or older version of the instructions might
work.
- It looks like the there would be a lot of maintenance to maintain these
pages. It would good to spend some time trying to figure out how write
distro agnostic instructions for platforms who's instructions don't change
very much between distros. This is something the current system doesn't do
well either.

Both of those could be solved with some new wiki macros, maybe one that
acts more like a switch statement (with a default case for unsupported ROS
distros). If you figure out the way those macro's should behave I'd try to
help you get them implemented.

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Vincent Rabaud via ros-release <
ros-release at lists.ros.org> wrote:

> A demo is always better than words, how about that:
> http://wiki.ros.org/Installation ?
> I am just including previous instructions, that's it.
>
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Ugo Cupcic <ugo at shadowrobot.com> wrote:
>
>> Sounds good!
>>
>> On 22 September 2015 at 10:46, Vincent Rabaud via ros-release <
>> ros-release at lists.ros.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I am sad that good instructions for installing on non-Ubuntu platforms
>>> get lost over time (look at http://wiki.ros.org/fuerte/Installation,
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/groovy/Installation)
>>>
>>> I propose to change the ROS installation page to be installation method
>>> / OS / Linux distribution centric and not ROS distribution-centric.
>>>
>>> Why ? For coherence with the rest of the wiki (package centric) and the
>>> advantages it brings: people can see that effort was made at some point for
>>> their favorite method, installation methods for old ROS distros might still
>>> be valid (e.g. Gentoo ), and instructions won't have to be duplicated for
>>> different ROS distributions as most of it is usually the same (e.g. OSX)
>>>
>>> What next ? I propose a central page
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/Installation
>>> with all the previous Linux distros / OS icons we've detailed (e.g.
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/groovy/Installation had a bunch)
>>> Those icons would point to, e.g. :
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/Gentoo
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/Windows
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/SourceInstallation
>>> Each page would itself have the usual ROS-distro macro (
>>> http://wiki.ros.org/WikiMacros#Version) that we love so much.
>>>
>>> I guess copying the content of the current/old pages will be the way to
>>> go (compared to linking). We will obviously keep the old links / pages
>>> valid.
>>>
>>> Opinions ?
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ros-release mailing list
>>> ros-release at lists.ros.org
>>> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-release
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Ugo Cupcic*Head of Software*+44 20 7700 2487ugo at shadowrobot.com
>> www.shadowrobot.com
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *Shadow Robot Company Ltd.*
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>> Registered Number 3308007 (England & Wales)
>>
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>>
>>
>
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>


-- 
William Woodall
ROS Development Team
william at osrfoundation.org
http://wjwwood.io/
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