[Fedora-packaging] Using SCLs for ROS releases vs simply dumping them into /opt/ros/$ros-release

[Ankur Sinha]

Hi Toshio,

On Thu, 2014-02-06 at 21:37 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> It all depends on the goals.  If the goal is for an upstream to
> provide their own packages that you get from them to run on fedora
> then their method is probably fine.

Upstream doesn't provide rpms, only debs. Even the new bloom addition
only provides spec files as far as I can see, but I haven't tested it
out yet to be sure.

>   If the goal is to submit to fedora then probably non-scl and
> installing to /usr is what's needed.  

This is what we were working on till now. We picked ros-groovy as the
release we wanted to provide in Fedora and were packing it up with
various patches to make it install to /usr. However, at the time we made
this decision, SCLs weren't much in the picture and neither was the
Fedora.next system where we could have "rings" of application systems.
There wasn't anything else that could be done really. 

> If the goal is to have parallel installed same versions then using
> scls may be the way to go.  (But do note that there is a fair bit of
> overhead in terms of packaging to do this... but some portion of the
> effort carries over to future parallel versions.

Ideally, this is what we'd like to do, to be able to provide users with
all releases of ROS. For example, even at the lab I work in, some people
use ros-fuerte, some use ros-groovy (they have good support for the PR2
robot) and some have already moved on to ros-hydro. ROS upstream
intentionally choose to install packages into /opt/ so that users (most
of which are researchers) could run multiple releases in parallel. 

I do understand that there's an overhead in maintaining multiple
releases. It's why we had chosen to pack up only one ROS release for
Fedora. However, with bloom generating spec files for us, this would
hopefully be manageable. If we don't have to modify upstream build files
to install to /usr, the work is *considerably* lessened too. (I'd expect
to have more people helping us too, since it's less work to package
stuff up if it's going into /opt straight away.)

Upstream recently informed me:

- With respect to the SCLs OSRF is now a registered LSB provider for
"ros" http://www.lanana.org/lsbreg/providers/providers.txt

I think SCLs are the way to go. ROS fits in perfectly here.

https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/bloom/pull/228
-- 
Thanks,
Warm regards,
Ankur (FranciscoD)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha

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