[ros-users] Submitting ROS software to Debian?

[Thomas Moulard]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 4:11 PM, Jochen Sprickerhof
<ros-users at jochen.sprickerhof.de> wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
>
> * Thomas Moulard <thomas.moulard at gmail.com> [2013-05-13 16:13]:
>> In practice, I am trying to figure out currently whether the
>> stand-alone projects
>> (PCL, Ecto and Gazebo) could be included into Debian in an official way.
>> A bit of polishing is still needed to achieve this (man page redaction,
>> multiarch support, etc.) but I think this is definitively within reach.
>
> Looking good. I was still waiting for the integration of OpenNI into
> Debian (my patches are on Github [1], if you want to look into that)
> before pushing for PCL.

Nice! Are you in touch with Hans-Christoph Steiner?
He is still owning the ITP but apparently this is stuck.
If you can take over this,  I can review the package and we can
have a DD to upload it when it is ready.

>> The main issue being that as long as ROS is not available officially,
>> it will not be possible to compile the ROS bindings for these packages
>> and include
>> them in the official repositories.
>
> The PCL developers met last week and we discussed how to disentangle PCL
> and ROS completely. Most probably we will move the ROS conversion
> functions into an own package. This would allow us to convert PCL into a
> system dependency for ROS. Stephen Miller is working on patches for
> that.

Awesome. :)
If this is going to be done then nothing is preventing us from going forward.

Leopold: Yes, of course! I guess the best place to make this packaging
effort happen is on debian-science. So you may consider joining the team?

I still feel like it is better to package first Gazebo, PCL, etc, then focus
on ROS. By the time the standalone projects are in Debian, maybe Hydro
or Indigo will be out which will make the whole thing much easier.
-- 
Thomas Moulard