[ros-users] best practices for ROS package repositories?

Jack O'Quin jack.oquin at gmail.com
Tue Aug 17 03:36:17 UTC 2010


On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 2:13 PM, Ken Conley <kwc at willowgarage.com> wrote:
> Hi Jack,
>
> Right now, the only rule is that we will index whatever URL you give
> us for your repo. Some repos use svn externals; in rare cases we index
> multiple URLs.
>
> We're working on bringing up a better toolchain to support releases
> and more structure to external repositories. If this toolchain works,
> it means that you will be able to use the same tools that we use
> internally here to manage the structure of our repositories in
> conjunction with releases and documentation. If you'd like to be a
> tester for this, let me know.
>
> There are two parts/phases to bringing up this toolchain:
>
> Phase 1: releases: supporting external releases of stacks into ROS
> distribution. This allows them the same access to deb-building,
> auto-generation of rosinstall files, etc...
>
> Phase 2:  documentation: right now we manually maintain the list of
> repositories that we index for rosbrowse. After we're sure we have
> phase 1 right, we transition rosdoc/rosbrowse to support rosinstall
> files. This should kill two birds with one stone: the rosinstall file
> that rosdoc/browse use could be the same rosinstall file you use for
> people to install your repo, and could be the same rosinstall file
> that our toolchain above generates.

That sounds good. Thanks.

I am glad to help with testing (although I won't want to reorganize
our repo again until after the fall semester).

> We try not to make blanket statements on how repositories have to be
> organized. We've chosen to organize our repos the way we have because
> we have 50+ researchers, engineers and interns working across very
> different areas of development and at different levels. We have to
> keep a careful balance of exploratory development and focused
> engineering, and we're still tuning that balance. There are also
> multiple organizations using GIT instead of SVN, and GIT has very,
> very different usage patterns.

Sounds like we should leave things mostly the same for this coming
semester. With one URL for the repository it all needs to stay
together.

That's OK, we don't have that many developers, so we can release all
the stacks in sync without much problem. I don't see any reason to
define a separate URL for each stack at this point. Once phase 2 is
available we can revisit the tree structure.

Regards,
-- 
 joq



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