[ros-users] ROS packaging for other distros

[Jack O'Quin]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 8:46 PM, Rich Mattes <richmattes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm interested in making it easier to package ROS for other distributions,
> and I have a few questions about the ROS release process.  Right now ROS is
> supported on Ubuntu via PPAs, but ROS is equally useful on other linux
> distributions.  Fuerte has made great strides towards being FHS compliant,
> and it's finally possible to start to incoporate ROS packages within
> distributions with FHS-based packaging guidelines.  There has been some
> previous discussion[1] on the issue, but I have some things I'd like to
> clarify based on initial efforts with creating packages for Fedora.  If this
> isn't the right place to ask, I'd appreciate a nudge in the right direction.
>
> 1) Right now, we're shooting for including everything in the "bare-bones"
> ros-underlay, and the higher level stacks that are part of the desktop
> install.  We've been able to grab tarballs for most of the higher level
> stacks from code.ros.org[2], but stacks included in the ros-underlay seem to
> be pretty out of date with respect to the versions grabbed by rosinstall
> (which come from the wg-debs repos on github.)  Are there any plans to
> release the stacks from github as tarballs (either separately or in one big
> combined tarball,) or is rosinstall the only supported method of obtaining
> the latest copies?
>
> 2) Is there any sort of announcement process or list for when new stack
> versions are created?  The download page at [2] contains the latest version
> of each stack as a tarball, but I can't find any indication of when a new
> release is made other than manually checking for new stack versions.
>
> 3) Is there any plan to include library ABI/versioning information in the
> ROS libraries?  Right now none of them set a version or soversion, so
> programs/libraries that are built against them may or may not work after ROS
> updates (i.e. if a change breaks ABI without incrementing the soversion, a
> user-compiled binary will still try to run but fail miserably.)
>
> 4) The <prefix>/stacks installation directory isn't compliant with the FHS,
> our initial efforts have us placing stacks in /usr/share/ros-stacks.  But
> /usr/share can't have binaries or libraries per the FHS either, so we've
> been moving them to /usr/bin and /usr/lib{,64} and symlinking the new
> locations back into the stack trees.  Admittely this is pretty kludgy, am I
> correct in gathering from REP 122[3] that future versions of ROS will
> install stack binaries to bin/ and lib/?

These are all good points, worth discussing in the Groovy Buildsystem SIG:

  http://ros.org/wiki/groovy/Planning/Buildsystem
-- 
 joq