[ros-users] Indigo buildfarm ready for releases

[Jon Binney]

Yeah, the system dependencies such as gazebo would definitely be
problematic, so I understand if it isn't feasible. Maybe worth coming up
with a quick list of what system dependencies have problematic version
changes between precise and trusty, to gauge the difficulty of this
approach?


On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 12:05 PM, William Woodall <william at osrfoundation.org
> wrote:

> 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
>>> >
>>> > _______________________________________________
>>> > ros-users mailing list
>>> > ros-users at lists.ros.org
>>> > http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>> >
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> ros-users at lists.ros.org
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>>>
>>
>>
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>>
>
>
> --
> William Woodall
> ROS Development Team
> william at osrfoundation.org
> http://williamjwoodall.com/
>
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