[ros-users] Improving Stack Installation

[Morgan Quigley]

Hi Bill,

> This is probably confusing for people who did not build from SVN since
> things can be installed using apt-get. How can this be improved?

I've been worrying about this for a while too. The current rosinstall
system is a middle ground in terms of power vs. ease-of-use: it allows
for fairly complex installations (overlays, etc.) but still requires
some general knowledge of unix command line tools.

> If there is more than one item which is most likely the primary path
> where new stacks should be installed?
> The first or the last element in $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH?

> Is there a way to determine the full path of the primary stack directory?
> $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH returns a list that usually has one item.

There are so many ways to use ROS that it's difficult to find
something which satisfies everyone. Many people, for example, have
multiple installations of ROS on their machine (stable versions,
unstable versions, etc.). Developers make up about 100% of the ROS
community now, and thus many/most/all people need to have multiple
versions of their own stacks on their systems, particularly once they
make releases and need to keep stable/unstable branches going.

That being said, I think we can do better in terms of making the
general collaboration use-case simpler ("find code -> checkout code ->
build code -> run code"), and we're working towards that. I'm happy to
discuss this further, but let's move to the ros-developers list.

Cheers,
Morgan


On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 12:01 AM, Bill Morris <morris at ee.ccny.cuny.edu> wrote:
> So I was reading the documentation one day and I saw this.
> http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Installation/Ubuntu/Deb
> sudo apt-get install ros-boxturtle-slam-gmapping
>
> This appears to install the slam-gmapping stack in a debian compatible
> form that is very appealing for some of our work. Unfortunately, it does
> not currently work with our stacks. Will/Could non Willow Garage stacks
> be added in the future or should we look at rolling our own system?
>
> Is there anything that is special about the process of building .deb
> files that could be documented or it is just using standard debian
> package management tools?
>
> This brings to mind another stack question, right now it appears that
> there is no way to easily determine what is the installation directory
> for a stack. The documentation for our stacks assume that you installed
> ROS from svn, compiled and you want to compile the stack from source.
>
> {{{#!shell
> cd ~/ros/stacks
> git clone http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/git/ccny-ros-pkg.git
> }}}
>
> This is probably confusing for people who did not build from SVN since
> things can be installed using apt-get. How can this be improved?
>
> Is there a way to determine the full path of the primary stack directory?
> $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH returns a list that usually has one item.
>
> If there is more than one item which is most likely the primary path
> where new stacks should be installed?
> The first or the last element in $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH?
>
> Perhaps something like this could work.
> {{{#!shell
> cd `rospack stack-install-dir`
> git clone http://robotics.ccny.cuny.edu/git/ccny-ros-pkg.git
> }}}
> where `rospack stack-install-dir` prints out the (first/last) value of $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH
> or the value of $ROS_STACK_INSTALL if set.
>
> Is there already another way of doing this?
>
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