As part of an effort to improve support for ROS 2 on RHEL (RedHat Enterprise Linux), we will be enabling RPM spec generation in Bloom for RHEL 7 this Friday (Feb 19 2021) for packages in Rolling.
On their next release, maintainers of packages in Rolling will see the Bloom RPM generator run for RHEL 7. For the vast majority of packages, this process will complete successfully and won’t disrupt the package’s release in any way. For packages which have system package dependencies on software which isn’t currently available for RHEL (according to rosdep), the generator will fail. At the prompt, the maintainer can choose to continue the release without generating for RHEL.
If for any reason a package should not be built on the buildfarm, it should be excluded in the buildfarm configuration YAML in the same way packages are excluded for Ubuntu and Debian. I’ll update this post with a URL when the config file has been merged. Because previously released packages didn’t generate RPM spec files when Bloom was run, they will also be listed for exclusion until a new release triggers the generator. Maintainers who wish to build RPM packages before their next release can run a Bloom release to increment the package release number without tagging a new version in the source repository.
We don’t have an ETA on when the RPM packages will be available for testing, but we’ll be sure to post an update to Discourse when we are.
Thanks!