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

[Ken Conley]

Thanks for all the feedback. We'll try and see how we can act on these
recommendations.  One of the next steps we are taking is letting
"repository maintainers" have more control over how their repository
is indexed. This will likely be done by allowing maintainers to submit
rosinstall files for their repository. This should provide additional
control over what is and isn't indexed, at least at a high level.

To clarify a previous point -- we're happy to document a 'suggested'
approach, but I'm not sure that WG should be solely coming up with
that suggested approach. There are some technical things that we can
do on our end like adding fields to manifests and updating our
indexers, but it's more difficult for us to come up with
recommendations on how you should layout your code. WG's repos have
700+ packages and 80+ stacks, carefully maintained for boxturtle,
cturtle, and unstable. This has led us to decisions about repository
layout that may not fit how other institutions manage their process.

For example, we compartmentalize our released stacks into their own
mini repos, with their own trunks. This is necessary for us for
stability and version reasons, but also creates extra maintenance in
the form of SVN externals, rosinstall files, etc... Our up-and-coming
external release system is our first attempt to start making our
repository maintenance tools (rosdistro, rosinstall file generation,
SVN externals creation) available to external users, but it's unclear
yet if there are demand for these tools or not -- they are currently
an artifact of our own internal process.

So, in other words, "what works for you, and what would you be willing
to do if only the feature existed?"

best,
Ken