[ros-users] Improving Stack Installation

[Ken Conley]

Answering the .deb questions below:

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?
>

We are making progress on improving our toolchain for this. You can see it
here:
https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/stacks/ros_release/

The goal is to enable anyone to make equivalent releases, but we really
needed some experience with boxturtle/cturtle to really start understanding
the problem better. Unfortunately, all of this deb-building stuff is very
infrastructure specific, and we will also need some new infrastructure in
order to enable external developers to release. Following the model of other
distributions, and to make this easier for people, we will most likely
accept versioned tarballs of stacks and put them in our pipeline (no
promises yet). For now, rosinstall is a universal solution that works across
a broader set of platforms.



>
> 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?
>

It's mostly just standard debian tools, but there is more magic to building
binary deb files more multiple Ubuntu targets. Our toolchain also relies on
'rosdistro' files, the version numbers to generate, which describe the
stacks to be include and the debian metapackages to generate. We also use
the rosdistro files to auto-generate rosinstall files.
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