[ros-users] Software Status Reporting and Custom Builds

[Austin Hendrix]

On 08/31/2013 03:39 AM, Edwards, Shaun M. wrote:
>
> All,
>
> We have received feedback from the users of ROS-Industrial on two 
> issues that I think are important to the larger community.  We have 
> taken preliminary steps to address these issues, but in no way would 
> we consider these the correct or permanent solutions.  It is for this 
> reason, I am address the ROS user's group to solicit feedback and 
> discussion about these two issues:
>
> 1.Stack/Meta-Package/Package Status -- Many people have commented that 
> it is hard to know the true status of a package (whether the code is 
> complete or in development).  The existence of a wiki is not an 
> indicator, as several packages in ROS (including some of our own) are 
> released early (i.e. agile development).  For this reason we have 
> started identifying the status of a package on our wiki pages (see: 
> http://ros.org/wiki/Industrial/Software_Status ).  Here is an example 
> of a stack/meta-package that has been marked with its current status: 
> http://ros.org/wiki/industrial_core .  This is only a start to what I 
> think needs to be done, but it solves and urgent need for us and all 
> the developers that are using our software.  I would like to see this 
> status or something similar used by the larger community (what to you 
> guys think).
>

+1. For the PR2, I primarily rely on the old 1.0/pre 1.0 version status, 
where stacks with version 1.0 and greater are defined as "stable" and 
pre-1.0 stacks are defined as unstable. This is mentioned in REP-9 ( 
http://ros.org/reps/rep-0009.html ), but isn't always well-followed 
outside of the PR2 ecosystem.

> 2.Code quality/testing/metrics -- Several users have asked for this 
> type of information about our packages.  This is one of the (not the 
> only) reasons we set up a Jenkins server specifically for 
> ROS-Industrial (see 
> http://rosindustrial.org/news/2013/8/13/jenkins-system-for-ros-industrial-repositories 
> ).  The ROS community already utilizes Jenkins servers for continuous 
> integration and debain builds, but code metrics are missing (even some 
> as simple as how many compiler warnings are generated).  We would like 
> to see this kind of data rolled into official ROS Jenkins servers.  Is 
> this a need for those in the large community?
>
+1 for metrics and better integration with the build system. The build 
system already runs tests as part of the deb build process, but ignores 
the test results and continues the build regardless. The devel jobs also 
run the tests and email build results to the package authors.

If we want to make this more visible, I would love to see a wiki macro 
that allows us to summarize the test results on the stack/package page, 
probably both the deb build test results and the devel test results. 
This probably means exporting the test result xml files from the build 
farm to a public server, and parsing them from the wiki.

-Austin

> Thanks for you time,
>
> Shaun Edwards
>
> Senior Research Engineer
>
> Manufacturing System Department
>
> http://robotics.swri.org
>
> http://rosindustrial.swri.org/
>
> http://ros.swri.org <http://ros.swri.org/>
>
> Join the ROS-Industrial Developers List 
> <https://groups.google.com/group/swri-ros-pkg-dev/boxsubscribe>
>
> Southwest Research Institute
>
> 210-522-3277
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ros-users mailing list
> ros-users at code.ros.org
> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/attachments/20130831/01835b58/attachment.html>