[ros-release] solving new platform/architecture release problems

[G.A. vd. Hoorn - 3ME]

On 28-4-2016 6:07, Tully Foote via ros-release wrote:
> Hi Vincent,
[..]
> The one time it might be appropriate to tag something in the package.xml is
> if the package has binary code included inside which is not compiled but
> supplied as a blob. However as we strongly discourage those cases and have
> very few of them, I think that continuing to use the blacklists for them is
> appropriate.
[..]

just a data point for the include-binary-blobs use-case: distributing 
binary blobs is something that is very popular with mfgs of (3D) cameras 
/ positioning systems / laser scanners. Their SDKs are typically of the 
form "docs + header + lib". Building ROS wrappers around that is 
possible (obviously), but to be able to release it, it's almost 
unavoidable to not do something like including those blobs in the package.

Perhaps we could come up with some other way of doing that, but for 
those cases it might be nice to be able to do something Vincent is 
proposing.

Another example are commercial SDKs for fieldbuses fi: no way to get 
anything compilable, and it really won't be found in a Debian/Ubuntu 
repository.


Gijs