[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Packaging and Release Management/Kinetic] Add usb_cam to ROS Kinetic main repository

[v4hn]

This is a standard problem almost all software distributions face over the years.
At some point the current upstream project maintainers do not respond anymore or quit the project.
The distribution still wants to ship the package though and is left with "the last" official release (and usually many patches over the years).
They don't want to take over maintainership, because it's just one package of the huge distribution and nobody has the resources to maintain individual packages *and* the infrastructure. Especially if the package has to be tested on hardware.
I believe OSRF should not try to maintain such packages.

Most users on the other hand do not consider becoming a maintainer (which never is as spectacular as it sounds) either because in their opinion they don't know the frameworks/the release process/the project well enough to do so,
or because they deliberately want to stay **users** because they work on higher-level stuff.
Guess what? Without a solid foundation it can become arbitrary hard to build on top of it...

In my opinion, the latter group is best qualified to resolve these issues.
By contacting the previous maintainers - maybe even by phone, if they don't respond to mails -, by helping out with maintenance, by taking over the release process or by forking the project altogether.

[quote="de-vri-es, post:5, topic:607"]
If you have the time, how would you feel about maintaining a fork of usb_cam and guide it into Kinetic? I think that would pretty much solve the problem.
[/quote]

:thumbsup:






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