[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Proposed changes to the ROS releases

[Hunter L. Allen]

This all sounds good to me, but I definitely hear the concerns raised above with respect to non-binary releases. Fortunately, I have some ideas to solve the lack of binary packaging problem.

@awesomebytes and I have been working on stabilizing the ROS Gentoo prefix installation, which, in case of the new release type,  seems like a good solution. The Gentoo prefix can install itself in any existing linux system, and it can be done outside of a root environment (though not all Gentoo packages support this method, @awesomebytes has been working hard to fix the incompatible packages that are relevant to ROS). 

One can actually create binary packages with Gentoo for installation. Moreover, it's possible to host a server for your binary packages built by portage (see [here](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Binary_package_guide])).

So, with a Gentoo prefix installation, we can have a community based server to build packages for your favorite robot, then host them on a community server.

The other advantage of this rolling release is that one can freeze a copy of the ROS-Overlay (the Gentoo install's repository) by forking it, or even creating your own repo using [Superflore](https://GitHub.com/ros-infrastructure/superflore). Superflore pulls changes from rosdistro and then creates the installers for a given ros release. This is a great use case for Superflore, actually, as it could actually create these binary packages (if we write the generator script for it) and push the packages to the package server.





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