What's the best way to contribute back stacks and packages?

asked 2011-06-21 15:27:30 -0600

Asomerville
2743 ●74 ●99 ●133 http://www.resquared.com/

updated 2011-06-22 05:04:45 -0600

We use ROS extensively where I work, and some of what we've written would be useful to the community and the engineers here would love to give back.

Given that:

We have code that would generally be useful (e.g. Bumblebee server, Gstreamer videonodelet)
We don't have any company sponsored external repositories.
We don't necessarily have funding to provide more than minimal support. (though we might sometimes where current projects are actively using said code)

Should we still try to publish this to the community?

What would be the best way to publish?

Is there a set of "best practices"?

Is there a preferred or ROS official VCS host that we should/could be using?
What are the licence requirements/guidelines? BSD/GPL/Mozilla/Apache?
Should we just edit the wiki to include links to our stuff, or is that frowned upon?

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answered 2011-06-21 16:11:20 -0600

Patrick Bouffard

2254 ●37 ●46 ●57 http://hybrid.eecs.ber...

updated 2011-06-23 07:39:53 -0600

tfoote

58457 ●128 ●550 ●526 http://www.ros.org/

Should we still try to publish this to the community

Yes!

What would be the best way to publish?

Whatever way is best for you, it's your code. To avoid having to set up and maintain your own external facing servers there are lots of options. Having tried a number I ultimately settled on hg hosted on bitbucket and I've been happy with that, but YMMV. You'll have to pick what works best for you. Other options are git+github, svn/hg+googlecode, bzr+launchpad and I'm sure many more. The ros indexers seem to play nice with all the above mentioned VCS's which is nice.

Merging kwc's answers too:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/Get%20Involved

As for the rest of the bullets:

* Is there a preferred or ROS official VCS host that we should/could be using?

We prefer hosts with the best performance and uptimes, which are probably the same criteria you would use as well.

* What are the licence requirements/guidelines? BSD/GPL/Mozilla/Apache?

BSD and Apache are generally the friendliest licenses if you wish to encourage use. We have had to do additional work on occasion to remove GPL code from libraries.

* Should we just edit the wiki to include links to our stuff, or is that frowned upon?

You are welcome to create wiki pages for your own packages/stacks. You should use discretion when editing wiki pages that aren't yours.

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I'll edit to include this, but I was wondering if there's a set of best practices for doing so: Preferred or ROS official VCS host? Better to try and submit as a replacement to the "official" package? License requirements? Etc.

Asomerville ( 2011-06-22 04:57:05 -0600 )edit

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answered 2011-06-22 20:41:24 -0600

mmwise

8372 ●45 ●74 ●99 http://www.meloneewise.com/

Also remember that ROS has a flat namespace on the wiki. Check to see if you are duplicating other package names.

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A really great enhancement to roscreate-pkg would be a warning if you try to create a package with the same name as an existing one.

Patrick Bouffard ( 2011-07-04 00:49:30 -0600 )edit

@Patrick: this would have a lot of unintended consequences, e.g. (1) if someone is following a tutorial, they get a warning about the package they are creating, (2) roscreate-pkg now is slower b/c it has to make a network call, etc...

kwc ( 2011-07-04 05:28:10 -0600 )edit

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answered 2011-06-22 05:43:36 -0600

kwc
12244 ●54 ●90 ●132 http://kwc.org/

Patrick's answer is good, but also want to include a link to:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/Get%20Involved

As for the rest of the bullets:

* Is there a preferred or ROS official VCS host that we should/could be using?

We prefer hosts with the best performance and uptimes, which are probably the same criteria you would use as well.

* What are the licence requirements/guidelines? BSD/GPL/Mozilla/Apache?

BSD and Apache are generally the friendliest licenses if you wish to encourage use. We have had to do additional work on occasion to remove GPL code from libraries.

* Should we just edit the wiki to include links to our stuff, or is that frowned upon?

You are welcome to create wiki pages for your own packages/stacks. You should use discretion when editing wiki pages that aren't yours.

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What's the best way to contribute back stacks and packages?

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