[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Melodic Morenia Buildfarm Available

[ruffsl]

I think this topic of releasing for non-LTSs and supporting alternate distro has been touched on a few times. I recall @tfoote discussing this last year, so I'll just link to that thread here for reference:

https://discourse.ros.org/t/rep3-proposal-for-lunar-loggerhead/1179/6?u=ruffsl

In my lab, we've never really use non-LTS ROS or non-LTS ubuntu releases, let alone other combination of with. Although, we do use previous ROS LTS with a newer Ubuntu LTS rather often, such as when working with or Fetch robots still locked at 14.04-Ubuntu/Indigo-ROS (due to closed source driver) from our labs  workstations running 16.04-Ubuntu for better desktop software. As @tfoote suggested, we've manly been getting by using Docker containers to cross over the distro gab.

In fact, recently we've taken to containerising every ROS node on the robot as so we could upgrade to 16.04 on our fetch robots, then use 14.04 imaged container to just run the binaries for fetch hardware drivers. For the rest of the fetch stack that is open source, we use a docker registry on a local lab server to automatically rebuild and deploy those packaged images nightly on 16.04 images to streamline with the rest of our custom packages we maintain from 16.04 workstations.

I would be interested in a community survey as to the distribution of users across ROS/OS comonations, just to see what the current landscape is at large. The last time this came up, I think one of the better justifications for non-LTS releases was to afford maintainers time to test and migrate to newer upstream libraries to coincide with Ubuntu's tick-tock cycle. Of course maintainers can always build everything from source, but with robots, testing your stack sometime requires testing your package against everything else you need to run the robot. Having a ROS disto binaries released into the OS your developing with can help reduce the debug time in packages that are not your own.





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