[ros-users] Indigo buildfarm ready for releases

[Morgan Quigley]

Hi Friends,

Thank you for resuming this discussion; it is very important and
relevant to many people.

In general, of course we would love to provide binary packages of as
many ROS distributions as possible on as many operating systems as
possible. Unfortunately, there is a difficult tradeoff between the
number of target platforms and the effort required by the package
maintainers.

The mailing list had a few discussions on this topic last year, which
may be useful to frame this discussion:

http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/2013-May/053252.html
http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/2013-June/067832.html
http://lists.ros.org/pipermail/ros-users/2014-January/068163.html

On the roadmap, the primary target for Ubuntu Trusty (14.04 LTS) is
ROS Indigo. Backporting ROS Indigo to Ubuntu Raring (13.04) seems to
have limited utility, since 13.04 and 13.10 are already or
nearly-already at EOL.

Forward-porting ROS Hydro to Ubuntu Trusty LTS would seem to have more
utility. Unfortunately, to produce a Hydro-Trusty binary release would
require significant community effort to re-release all the packages.
OSRF only maintains a small fraction of the available released ROS
packages, so we are very sensitive to the existing time commitments of
the package maintainers and hesitate to ask more effort from them. Our
goal is for the generous efforts of the maintainers to provide the
most utility possible to the largest possible user community.

As has already been identified in this thread, building Hydro from
source on other systems (Ubuntu Saucy, Ubuntu Trusty) currently works
quite smoothly, with the caveat being the ~30 minute build time for
Hydro-desktop, which is of course dependent on one's internet
bandwidth and system performance.

Taking these considerations into account, we think the best approach
is to improve the experience of building ROS distributions from
source, so they can be used more easily on distros for which they were
not originally targeted. There are various things that could be done
to improve the build-from-source process: better/easier documentation
[1], better/easier software tools to automate the process [2], and so
on. If you are interested in participating, ros-sig-buildsystem [3]
would be a good place for such documentation/tool development and
discussion.

Cheers,
Morgan

[1] http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installation/Source
[2] perhaps the tools could display cat photos in ASCII art during the build.
[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ros-sig-buildsystem

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Jochen Sprickerhof
<ros-users at jochen.sprickerhof.de> wrote:
> * Michael Fritscher <michael.fritscher at telematik-zentrum.de> [2014-03-27 18:08]:
>> But in my experience, apt can handle about every kind of abuse fairly well -
>> to be honest I've done way trickier things in the past without any problems.
>
> Yes, I did these tricks myself aswell. But as Jack wrote, we should not
> propose it as the official way, as it's too fragile to maintain in
> larger installations. But if you want to do it cleanly, use a chroot
> (have a look at the schroot package), this is what I use nowadays.
>
> Cheers Jochen
>
> _______________________________________________
> ros-users mailing list
> ros-users at lists.ros.org
> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>