[Fedora Robotics] Catkin.. *sigh*

[Rich Mattes]

On 07/24/2013 10:06 AM, Ankur Sinha wrote:
> That'd be great. :)
>
See [1].  I know catkin builds, and I'll see if I can get
> Maybe it's time to start tracking groovy or hydro in a fedorapeople
> repo? That way, we don't pollute the official fedora repos with our
> "experiments"? It'll also make it clear that any files in the
> fedorapeople repo are completely in alpha state and may or may not work
> with official fedora repos?
>
I kinda started doing that at one point at [2].  I did start tracking 
fuerte in a copr, and managed to keep the packages so that they don't 
interfere with the core packages [3].  I started generating groovy 
packages as well, but never got as far as setting up a copr.

I like coprs more than repos.fp.o because they handle doing all of the 
mock builds support chain builds by feeding previously buildt packages 
into the next build in the chain.  I think we should file a bug to see 
if we can get multiple people access to kick off builds, and then figure 
out a common space to upload the SRPMs to build so that more than one 
person can work on it.

> Since posting, I've been reading on bloom, catkin and catkin_pkg.
> catkin_pkg is supposed to be a stand alone catkin python API and I
> expected catkin's methods available there to let me get info from the
> package.xml files. Doesn't seem to be the case though. (I was trying to
> see if I can find enough API to hack a packagexml2spec script since the
> package.xml file should contain all the dep info we need (or so I
> think)). Bloom is slightly more complex since it's really *tightly*
> integrated with git. Not sure how well it'll fit with just generating
> rpms, in mock etc. I'm still looking for docs on deploying bloom and
> using it to generate anything myself to get a better hang of how it
> works.
>
> There's so much random documentation that I kinda keep getting confused.
> Lately, I found this which makes it feel like we can build each package
> from source manually:
>
> http://ros.org/doc/api/catkin/html/adv_user_guide/underlay.html
>
I think building each package manually isn't too hard, they're all 
basically cmake projects.  It'd be really nice to have something like 
bloom handle the annoying details of actually generating a spec 
(especially for the case where it's just generating one monster package 
to drop in /opt like how the ROS debs currently work).  It would be much 
harder to get a tool like bloom to create proper -devel subpackages, 
give each stack its own package, etc., and there's enough FHS issues 
with default ROS packages that they all pretty much need manual 
intervention before being suitable for Fedora proper.

Rich

[1] http://rmattes.fedorapeople.org/groovypackages/catkin/
[2] http://rmattes.fedorapeople.org/ros-groovy/
[3] http://rmattes.fedorapeople.org/ros-fuerte/SRPMS/