[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Next Generation ROS] ROS2 support: ROS Answers?

Tully Foote ros.discourse at gmail.com
Wed Jan 24 19:32:25 UTC 2018



We certainly could add distro agnostic tags like `ros` and `ros2` to the list but I think that "forcing" them to select an arbitrary one from the list is actually significantly helpful for people trying to answer the question. The asker can easily select the version that they are using, multiple tags are completely valid too. And it also has significant value to people browsing the site in the potentially distant future.

Any question is asked with a frame of reference as to where it's going to be implemented. It also may be true that their question is distro agnostic at the moment since the behavior is the same currently, but in the future distros that behavior might change and the question is no longer "distro agnostic". Understanding the state of the system when the question was asked and in what context the question was answered can be valuable to future readers. 

For example [this question](https://answers.ros.org/question/52330/memory-requirement/) is moderately distro agnostic asking about install size. However, it's noteably only has answers for fuerte because that's the  latest released version available at the time. For future users it does't really help you. Another example is that we added topic statistics in indigo. Before Indigo there were [questions about analyzing network traffic](https://answers.ros.org/question/35363/tool-for-analyzing-ros-network-traffic/) that got completely different answers than a question [a few distros later](https://answers.ros.org/question/61093/how-can-statistics-for-all-active-ros-topics-be-obtained/).

Similarly a question may be about a generic cmake usage, but depending on which rosdistro is being used the cmake version available is not the same. As we get to newer versions of cmake there are significant api improvements that may not have been available in older rosdistros and thus would not be captured.

There is one corner case of the debian and ubuntu rolling releases that are not clearly captured. I don't know what we'd want to capture them as. `<UBUNTUDISTRO>-upstream` or something like that?





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