[ros-users] resolving open REP-0122 issues

[Jochen Sprickerhof]

* Bill Morris <bill at iheartengineering.com> [2012-07-24 19:29]:
> So, I'm referring explicitly to the system /etc located in the root
> directory. Most Ubuntu systems
> have /etc/python, /etc/python2.6, /etc/python3.1 so I don't think it is
> unreasonable to use /etc/ros, /etc/ros-fuerte, /etc/ros-groovy. Also I
> like that if we have a symlink from /etc/ros to /etc/ros-fuerte it would
> make it easy to switch the config to groovy by changing the symlink.

If you want to set a system wide default, I would propose to use the
update-alternatives system under /etc/alternatives/, which has a nice
dpkg integration. In the long run it would be great if ROS would switch
to shlib based dependencies (see dh_shlibdeps), proper API versioning
and separation of development vs. runtime packages. This way we could
lift the multiple version installation problem at some point.

Cheers Jochen