[ros-users] Indigo buildfarm ready for releases

[William Woodall]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 4:36 PM, Jon Binney <jon.binney at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>
> If it builds from source on other platforms, would there still be
> significant developer effort to create debs? Or do you mean that only the
> core packages in hydro build from source on Saucy/Trusty?
>
> The ideal situation from a developer point of view would be if there were
> indigo debs for ubuntu precise. This would allow people who are running
> hydro/precise to update their own packages so that they work with indigo,
> and then to install ubuntu trusty on their machines. It would be
> essentially the same as when we switched from electric to fuerte - fuerte
> had debs on lucid, but also had debs for precise.
>

Generally any time you port forward (add debs for a new ubuntu for an
existing ROS distro) or backwards (create debs for a new ROS distro on
ubuntu platforms that are older or unsupported), there is going to be some
significant work involved.

However, we are not as far along in the Indigo first time releases, so
having bloom start to make debian files for Indigo on Precise is tractable,
but still a lot of work to re-bloom already released things. The other
problem with backporting Indigo to precise is the changes in dependencies.
This is not generally a problem with things like boost or log4cxx, but in
this case Gazebo is a good example of a problem. Gazebo's default in
precise is 1.x and in trusty it is 2.x, so now any ROS packages which
should be released into Indigo not only need to update for 2.x Gazebo, but
also needs to be backwards compatible with Gazebo 1.x. To avoid that, you
could install the gazebo2 deb on precise for Indigo, but I believe (could
be wrong) that the gazebo2 deb cannot be installed at the same time as the
gazebo1 deb, so then you wouldn't be able to have Indigo above gazebo and
Hydro above gazebo installed at the same time.

Gazebo is just an example, and while there are solutions to these problems,
they always take effort, not just for us but for maintainers.

Unlike Hydro on Trusty, I believe Indigo on Precise is tractable, but still
a big cost in terms of engineering time.


>
> That being said, I understand that it's a huge effort to support extra
> distributions, so this may not be practical.
>
> -Jon
>
>
>
>>
>> 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
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
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>> > ros-users at lists.ros.org
>> > http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>> >
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>
>
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-- 
William Woodall
ROS Development Team
william at osrfoundation.org
http://williamjwoodall.com/
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