[ros-users] Indigo buildfarm ready for releases

[Toris, Russell Charles]

I can see the logical reasoning behind targeting Indigo on Trusty, but I do have concerns that it will also delay the community from adopting it. I had to install Trusty on an extra computer just so that I could begin Indigo migration since if I moved my main computer over I would be without a supported ROS version.

--
Russell Toris
Graduate Student | WPI Department of Computer Science
rctoris at wpi.edu | http://users.wpi.edu/~rctoris/


________________________________________
From: ros-users-bounces at lists.ros.org [ros-users-bounces at lists.ros.org] on behalf of Jack O'Quin [jack.oquin at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2014 11:45 AM
To: User discussions
Subject: Re: [ros-users] Indigo buildfarm ready for releases

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 9:01 AM, Jochen Sprickerhof <ros-users at jochen.sprickerhof.de<mailto:ros-users at jochen.sprickerhof.de>> wrote:
Hi,

* Tully Foote <tfoote at osrfoundation.org<mailto:tfoote at osrfoundation.org>> [2014-03-24 20:58]:
> We're pleased to announce the ROS build farm for Indigo Igloo is now
> available.  It includes over 180 packages already for Ubuntu 13.10, Saucy
> Salamander, and Ubuntu 14.04, Trusty Tahr. We expect that number to
> continue to grow rapidly. Installation instructions already exist for
> Ubuntu using debians or for compiling from source [1], and you can see the
> status of Indigo packages on this page:

Do you plan to support Indigo on older Ubuntu versions (like 13.04 or
12.04) as well? Point is, that the normal migration tactic is to have
both ROS versions installed and switch them to the new version one ofter
the other. At the moment this wouldn't be possible, as Hydro is only
available until 13.04 (cf. [1]), whereas Indigo starts with 13.10.
Initially the plan was to support Hydro on 13.10 (see [2]), but maybe it
would be easier to support Indigo on an older version.

Having multiple versions installed was always a selling point for ROS
(given that it's so monolithic), so I think we should really work on
providing upgrade paths to our users.

Cheers Jochen

[1] http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/2014-January/068162.html
[2] http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/2013-May/053252.html

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+1 I fully agree: this zero-overlap plan will drastically delay adoption of Indigo.

For example, the UTexas CS department will not be upgrading their student computer labs to Trusty until August. They will remain on Precise until then, so the Robotics lab will continue using Hydro on Precise. So, no substantial work with Indigo will happen before the fall session. At that point I don't know what will happen; with no concurrent platform for Indigo migration, we may be looking at a train wreck.

We never had to cope with that sort of abrupt discontinuity in previous ROS distros.
--
 joq