[ros-users] ROS package git repository conventions?

Ken Conley kwc at willowgarage.com
Tue Aug 16 16:30:41 UTC 2011


2011/8/16 Lorenz Mösenlechner <moesenle at in.tum.de>:
> Hi,
>
> I'm not sure if this approach is really practical. The problem with
> git submodules is that they reference a specific revision in another
> repository. That means whenever I add a new package to a stack and I
> want to have it indexed, I need to make sure that I update the
> repository with the submodule, too. The same holds whenever I make an
> API change or something that I want to have indexed.

Thanks for the explanation.

> What about using a magic rosinstall file in a repository. For
> instance, if the git repository tum-ros-pkg.git contains a file
> tum-ros-pkg.rosinstall on toplevel, could the crawler maybe use it to
> find the actual repositories with the stacks?

I like this implementation approach, though I would make it less
magical.  Instead of pointing to tum-ros-pkg.git, we could have a
meta-indexer that listed these rosinstall files and produce a combined
index.

Overall, it doesn't suffer from the checkout naming issues and works
for any git/hg/svn/bzr-based repository.  In the future, it
potentially also allows repo maintainers to produce rosinstall index
files for different ROS distributions.

 - Ken

> Lorenz
>
>> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Lorenzo Riano <lorenzo.riano at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Ok, a more practical example:
>> >
>> > We at Ulster have a shared account on GitHub called  "uu-isrc-robotics". We
>> > started with one repository, called uu-isrc-robotics-pr2-pkgs that contained
>> > one stack and some packages in the stack. When we released the rubik's cube
>> > solver code, I decided to keep it separate from the other stacks (to avoid
>> > people having to pull a lot of code they don't need). I guess this will
>> > become common practice in the future, say Berkely stack becomes a collection
>> > of several stacks hosted by the same user (but not in the same repository).
>> >
>> > Now the problem is that every time we release a new stack, we'll have to
>> > notify ros-users, get a confirmation, and wait for the the crawler to find
>> > the new stack. So my idea would be to have a crawler that monitors a user
>> > account (for example "uu-isrc-robotics") and automatically finds and indexes
>> > which repositories contain stacks.
>> >
>> > I hope it makes sense now
>>
>> The above implementation that is a bit trickier, as it involves the
>> crawler having explicit capabilities with github.  As the crawler is
>> just a rosinstall file, this requires some big feature additions.
>>
>> Also, the major issue I see is that the implicit mapping of the
>> repository name to a checkout name is not correct.  This is important
>> as ROS sets the stack name based on the directory name.
>>
>> As an alternative, you could just create a repository called
>> 'uu-isrc-robotics'.  When you create a new stack repo on git, you
>> could add it as a submodule.  Our indexer would only have to know
>> about uu-isrc-robotics and would get updates whenever you update that
>> repo.   Still no need to notify ros-users, and it has an explicit
>> opt-in for each repository -- for example, for most github accounts,
>> there are several non-ROS-related repositories as well.
>>
>> So my question was basically, why the github-centric approach, instead
>> of just git submodules?  I don't use git, so I don't know if there are
>> some deficiencies with submodules that could be corrected with the
>> github approach.
>>
>>  - Ken
>>
>>
>> >
>> > On 16 August 2011 16:52, Ken Conley <kwc at willowgarage.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Lorenzo Riano <lorenzo.riano at gmail.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > I have received some emails of people who wanted to run the rubik's cube
>> >> > stack, but they didn't want to pull the whole UU stack just because the
>> >> > rubik's stack depends on a single package in UU (OK it's a bit
>> >> > complicated...)
>> >> >
>> >> > Anyway, what I think would be interesting is to have the ROS indexer
>> >> > scan
>> >> > the packages of a (for example) GitHub user and retrieve all the stacks.
>> >> > This way Berkley, TUM, UU and so on will have an account on GitHub (or
>> >> > google code or whatever) with several repositories, each of them being a
>> >> > stack.
>> >>
>> >> What is the argument for this over, say, git submodules?  There are
>> >> many issues on the implementation side of doing this, so I'm wondering
>> >> what the advantage would be.
>> >>
>> >>  - Ken
>> >>
>> >> >
>> >> > I hope this makes sense...
>> >> >
>> >> > Lorenzo
>> >> >
>> >> > On 15 August 2011 21:05, Ibrahim Awwal <ibrahim.awwal at berkeley.edu>
>> >> > wrote:
>> >> >>
>> >> >> Hi ROS users,
>> >> >>
>> >> >> We're considering/planning on switching to git/github for the Berkeley
>> >> >> ROS package. What are the conventions on structure and such that people
>> >> >> are using? With svn we have a url like this
>> >> >> http://ros.berkeley.edu/svn/berkeley-ros-pkg/ with all our stuff, with
>> >> >> git would it be preferrable to have one repo called berkeley-ros-pkg or
>> >> >> separate repos for each stack and maybe link them together with
>> >> >> submodules? What are other people doing that are using git? It seems
>> >> >> like at least TUM is using separate repos per project on their git repo
>> >> >> (which seems to be the much more sane route) but I was wondering if
>> >> >> there was any requirement to have something called foo-ros-pkg
>> >> >> somewhere. Thanks,
>> >> >>
>> >> >> -Ibrahim
>> >> >> _______________________________________________
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>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> >
>> >> > phone: +44 (0)28 71375187
>> >> > email: l.riano at ulster.ac.uk, lorenzo.riano at gmail.com
>> >> > skype: lorenzo.riano
>> >> >
>> >> > Webpage: http://isrc.ulster.ac.uk/Staff/LRiano/Contact.html
>> >> >
>> >> > _______________________________________________
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>> >> >
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>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > phone: +44 (0)28 71375187
>> > email: l.riano at ulster.ac.uk, lorenzo.riano at gmail.com
>> > skype: lorenzo.riano
>> >
>> > Webpage: http://isrc.ulster.ac.uk/Staff/LRiano/Contact.html
>> >
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>
> --
> Lorenz Mösenlechner            | moesenle at in.tum.de
> Technische Universität München | Boltzmannstr. 3
> 85748 Garching bei München     | Germany
> http://ias.cs.tum.edu/         | Tel: +49 (89) 289-26910
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