Hi, as I also recently switched to Archlinux on my work machine, I am finally facing all the ROS installation stuff, as well. Is there any process to add / propose new packages to ros-melodic-arch?
Also, what is the process of syncing between the GH versions and the AUR packages? For example, for the moveit packages I noticed, that they are on version 1.0.3 on GH, but in the AUR most of them are on 1.0.2.
And finally: What are the ways to contribute? I don’t have that much time to put into this, but as I already started creating own PKKBUILDs locally for packages I use often, but are not in the AUR, it might be better to merge my efforts upstream somehow.
As for adding and proposing new packages, the process is as follows:
Create a package request issue including the name and source repo of the associated package to be added.
We will create the associated repo on GH
Submit a PR to the associated repo
After merging the PR, it will be synced to the AUR (can be installed with AUR helper at this point)
After syncing to the AUR, it will later be added to the binary repo oscloud (for melodic) and arch4edu (for noetic) (can be installed with pacman at this point)
After getting the package to a binary repo, we submit a rosdep request for the package (can be installed with rosdep at this point)
As for syncing, we have an automatic pipeline for syncing the packages from GH to the AUR. However, the sync only occurs when the PKGBUILD is build in a clean root. There might be a hiccup on the moveit packages. In this case, it is appropriate to create an issue labelled Need to sync on the respective the package and we will take a closer look at it. Or you can try to build the package in a clean chroot and report your findings.
Objectives that we have right now are the follows:
Get noetic (up to ros-noetic-desktop-full) packages out on the AUR
Get noetic (up to ros-noetic-desktop-full) packages on arch4edu
Get noetic (up to ros-noetic-desktop-full) packages on rosdep
Similar three objectives for foxy as well
Flesh out the rest of the noetic packages that are not under ros-noetic-desktop-full but are still under the noetic distribution
Take a look at the issues and projects for the corresponding GH organizations as well. There may be some build errors and PKGBUILDs that need some cleaning up.
I know I have been pretty active in maintaining and helping users on Arch Linux out for ROS Melodic. However, with the release of ROS Noetic today, I will stop help in maintaining ROS Melodic packages on Arch Linux. With 2-3 three people it is hard to maintain so many ROS packages and dealing with two distributions will be even harder.
As such, I will be focusing my efforts concerning ROS on Arch Linux solely on ROS Noetic. Feel free in helping out with the ROS Noetic packages by offering PKGBUILDs and submitting bug reports. See you guys over at https://github.com/ros-noetic-arch from now!
@majorx234 If you could transfer your packages to @bionade24 as mentioned in Who is using ROS on Archlinux? that would help with straightening out all melodic packages. I am currently trying to get the CI back up running for all packages so that we can update all packages from that state.
So, as I’m still the ros-melodic maintainer, here a short update on the current status of tools. I’ll also tell about noetic so if anything’s wrong @acxz please correct it.
Repo Update Management & check tool (at least for melodic): https://github.com/bionade24/ros-aur-helpers (Currently under revision and will then move to the ros-arch organization)
