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

[Marcela Mašláňová]

On 02/08/2014 02:04 AM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
> 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.
>
If you want to provide more releases, then SCL is good choice.

> 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.)
>
I guess installation and workflow for SCLs in Fedora wasn't solved yet. 
If you are using copr, it's way to go before we will figure out.

> 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
>
Nice :)
>
>
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Marcela