Hi everyone!
Since we found that often times we used non-indexed packages (i.e Packages that are not indexed in the rosdistro repository) while implementing our research projects, we wanted to figure out how many of these packages are out there, and whether their quality differs significantly compared to packages that are indexed.
To accomplish this, we created a tool called rosmap which gathers all repositories that can be found on the index, as well as many non-indexed packages, and gathers data about their popularity, dependencies and some obvious code-defects.
We think that this tool might be useful for researchers and interested individuals looking to get a more representative corpus of ROS Packages, which - based on our findings - should contain more packages that are a little rougher around the edges.
In addition to the tool, we published a paper back in Febuary at the IEEE International Conference on Robotic Computing 2019 titled “Can I depend on you? Mapping the dependency and quality landscape of ROS packages”, which goes more into detail describing the differences between non-indexed packages and indexed packages.
You can find the tool, as well as usage documenation on Github.
I would appreciate any kind of feedback! If you encounter any issues while using the tool, please don’t hesitate to create an issue on Github, and I will try to address it ASAP!