[ros-users] REP 122, REP 123, and REP 124: changes to ROS for ROS Fuerte

[Bill Morris]

On Sat, 2012-02-11 at 11:07 -0800, Ken Conley wrote:
... 
> That interface notion is a good perspective on this.  One possibility
> to satisfy the various needs is to pull the share/ part of the REP as
> its not fully baked. For documentation purposes, I can put it in a
> Future Work section, along with a summary of the proposals around lib/
> that you and Bill have put forth.  A future REP can then easily come
> in and add to the specification.
> 
> Thoughts?

On somewhat related topic that has been bugging me, we have a growing
need for OS specific ROS packages that are not part of the ROS build
system and are capable of installing files outside of /opt without
resorting to hackery.

A few use cases:
A package that makes GUI tools like rviz, gazebo and rx* available under
the Applications menu in gnome.

Scripts for starting ROS on bootup could probably be feasible without a
post-install script. Keeping laptops from sleeping when the lid is
closed requires modification of the system gconf defaults, and would
probably be useful for robots other than the TurtleBot.

System indicators and applets such as Rind [1] need to be installed in
the correct location to be available.

For Rind we added a 'make install' target to put things in the right
place but AFAIK this won't work with rosrelease.

In the short term my concern is namespace conflicts if we start
packaging debians outside of the rosrelease system. Perhaps we can
reserve ros-<distro>-system-*.deb or ros-<distro>-external-*.deb for ROS
related debian packages that install outside of /opt

In the long term, I would like to see rosrelease support for installing
files to /etc and etc though there may be unforeseen issues with this
approach.

[1] http://www.ros.org/wiki/rind

-- 
Bill Morris <bill at iheartengineering.com>
I Heart Engineering
http://www.iheartengineering.com
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