[ros-users] ROS Packages Mantainer Statusvvvv

Dirk Thomas dthomas at osrfoundation.org
Sat Apr 27 22:01:08 UTC 2013


On 27.04.2013 02:31, Daniel Stonier wrote:
>
>
>
> On 27 April 2013 16:42, Tully Foote <tfoote at osrfoundation.org <mailto:tfoote at osrfoundation.org>> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>     On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 10:30 PM, Dirk Thomas <dthomas at osrfoundation.org <mailto:dthomas at osrfoundation.org>> wrote:
>
>         On 26.04.2013 20 <tel:26.04.2013%2020>:48, Daniel Stonier wrote:
>
>
>             This is great. I found this last night and was curious how the tags were generated.
>
>             The rep could use a clear definition on the distinction between status 'developed' and 'maintained' though.
>
>
>         I will update the REP with the following definitions:
>
>         * developed: The maintainer is actively developing the package.
>            There are new features which will be implemented or some kind of a roadmap.
>            It also includes the responsibilities of "maintained".
>
>         * maintained: The maintainer is taking care of (re-)releasing the package for the specific distro, handling incoming questions and bug reports.
>            He does not necessarily fix all bugs himself but responds to them or relays them to an upstream project.
>            He should also care about maintaining the documentation, e.g. the wiki page of the package.
>
>         * unmaintained: The person listed as a maintainer in the package manifest is not maintaining the package anymore and does not perform any kind of releases or maintenance tasks.
>
>         * end-of-life: The package will not be released anymore in the future.
>            Anybody depending on that package should not depend on that package any longer.
>            Commonly the status_description will indicate why the package is not continued and/or what migration path users have.
>
>
>
>             I'm not sure it's immediately obvious, but I'm guessing it is whether there's a promise the
>             abi won't change during the release. Is this correct?
>
>
>         The status does not imply any kind of ABI promise.
>
>
>     For reference the notes are here about this. https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/27#issuecomment-14996226 We chose to represent the maintenance status independently of the QA process as
>     they are often correlated, but can be completely independent.  We deferred how to represent the QA process results but expect that it will can stored in the source, likely an export in the
>     package.xml, as it is persistent.  Whereas maintainer status is more dynamic than the source.
>
>     Tully
>
>
> That make sense. Though I think that the developed status will very closely reflect that correlation. What are the use cases when they are independent, and are those use cases important to distinguish
> for the users of the releases?

"developed" is adequate if someone is actively working on a package.
Even when there is roadmap and features development ongoing it does not necessarily imply that the existing API is not stable.
Sometimes that is the case - but we should not generalize that.

"maintained" is usually used if not active development is happening.
Often this might be the case is someone is stepping up to perform the "minimal tasks" like releasing into new distros and making sure that the package keeps building (and hopefully running).

The differentiation of these two states allows users to set expectations on future development reasonably.

- Dirk


>
> Daniel.
>
>
>         - Dirk
>
>
>
>
>             Cheers,
>             Daniel.
>
>
>
>             On 27 April 2013 12:09, Tully Foote <tfoote at osrfoundation.org <mailto:tfoote at osrfoundation.org> <mailto:tfoote at osrfoundation.__org <mailto:tfoote at osrfoundation.org>>> wrote:
>
>                  Hi Everyone,
>
>                  I'm happy to announce that with the upgrades to the ROS infrastructure, specifically REP 137, we can now provide a maintainer status for catkin based packages for Groovy [1] and Hydro
>             [2].  If you
>                  browse these status pages you will see now not just the versions and build status, but also the maintainer and the maintenance status.  This is part of our effort to make the
>             development status of
>                  packages more easily discoverable to users.
>
>                  All packages are initialized to unknown and maintainers are asked to submit a pull request to state that they will maintain the package for this rosdistro.  Each successive rosdistro
>             will request
>                  that maintainers resubmit pull requests to declare their intent to continue maintaining the package.  After most maintainers are filled in and the state of the system is determined we
>             will put out
>                  a call for adoption for packages which do not have active maintainers.
>
>                  We have 4 supported maintenance levels:
>                  developed
>                  maintained
>                  unmaintained
>                  end-of-life
>
>                  More details the status definitions can be found in REP 137 [3]
>
>                  If you are a maintainer please submit a pull request to state the expected level of maintenance.  If you are not currently a maintainer please consider reviewing packages which you
>             use or care
>                  about and consider volunteering to maintain them if there is a call for adoption.  Being a maintainer is not a large commitment to do significant development, it is simply to keep
>             packages up to
>                  date and make the occasional release.
>
>                  To update maintainer status you need to submit a pull request to the rosdistro repo.  Some examples are included below.
>
>                  Tully
>
>
>
>                  [1] http://www.ros.org/debbuild/__groovy.html <http://www.ros.org/debbuild/groovy.html>
>                  [2] http://www.ros.org/debbuild/__hydro.html <http://www.ros.org/debbuild/hydro.html>
>                  [3] http://ros.org/reps/rep-0137.__html <http://ros.org/reps/rep-0137.html>
>
>
>                  Example Pull Requests:
>             https://github.com/ros/__rosdistro/pull/755 <https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/755>
>             https://github.com/ros/__rosdistro/pull/753 <https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/753>
>             https://github.com/ros/__rosdistro/pull/750 <https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/750>
>             https://github.com/ros/__rosdistro/pull/744 <https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/pull/744>
>
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