[ros-users] REP for Third Party Package Releasing

Armin Hornung HornungA at informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Mon Feb 25 11:14:15 UTC 2013


On 2013-02-20 21:25, William Woodall wrote:
> I have drafted a REP, tentatively REP-136, which is an Informational 
> REP providing a recommendation for how to release third party packages 
> into the ROS ecosystem. In this context a third party package is any 
> software package which is used in the ROS ecosystem, but exists 
> outside of the ROS ecosystem, and therefore is neither catkin based 
> nor rosbuild based.
>
> You can find this draft REP here:
>
> https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/blob/release_third_party/rep-0136.rst

+1

After using the previous version in bloom/catkin this new REP has some 
great improvements for third-party (non-catkin) packages such as 
OctoMap, and the explanations clear up many things.


>
> And the pull request containing the drafting history is here:
>
> https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/23
>
> To summarize the recommendation, third party packages should:
>
>   * Have a package.xml
>       o Which run_depend's on catkin
>       o Has a <build_type> tag in the <export> section
>   * Install the package.xml
>

This and the motivation / rationale in the REP sound like it's 
recommended to put the package.xml in the the upstream source repo, 
while the specification recommends to inject the templated version into 
the release-repo (putting package.xml into the upstream repo is only 
mentioned as alternative). This should probably be cleared up with a 
clear preference on one method. From the maintenance overhead, putting 
package.xml into the upstream source repo sounds like the best to me (if 
there is control of the upstream repo by the maintainer).

Or maybe it's just not clearly worded? The specification section 
mentions "Inject a templated package.xml into the upstream using bloom". 
Here, "upstream" probably means the upstream branch in the ros-gbp 
release repo, whereas in other places it also refers to the upstream 
repository. This should be clearly differentiated, as the context may 
not always be clear to the uninitiated reader.

Other than that I only found a small (but potentially confusing) typo. 
Pull request here: https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/28
Is that how the process should work on GitHub?

Best,

-- 
Armin Hornung
Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Contact: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~hornunga

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