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

[Rich Mattes]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2015 at 4:41 PM, William Woodall via ros-release
<ros-release at lists.ros.org> wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.  Under Fedora, the text just reads "NOT SUPPORTED" for hydro
and higher.  We know it's not supported, as it wasn't listed under the
"Supported" methods on the previous page.  That doesn't mean it's not
possible to install hydro or higher - in fact, it's quite possible
following the Source Installation instructions (which contain
fedora-specific instructions for installing the python prerequisites.)


> - 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.
>

For the most part, new/undefined pages should default to referencing
the Source Installation page with a note that there are no
platform-specific instructions and there might be bugs that arise
(missing deps, etc.).  If there are platform-specific instructions
that deviate from the source installation page, (gentoo overlay,
Fedora RPMs, etc,) then the page text for that specific distro should
be updated with the relevant information.  It still requires someone
to re-evaluate the platform-specific instructions every time a new
rosdistro is added, but that could be a good thing if it keeps the
instructions from stagnating release to release.

> 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.
>

Again, it should probably just be a pointer to the Source installation
page with a short explaination that bugs might occur, deps may be
unavailable, and a link to ros answers.

Rich