Prerelease tests with Bloom on first-release

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The prerelease website can test your package based on data from three places:

• The repository and branch listed in your source entry in the distribution.yaml on ros/rosdistro
  • This is the devel option.
• The release repository and the "release" branch for each package.
  • Since this is a branch it will be updated after you push from bloom, but before you submit the pull request.
  • This is the latest option.
• The latest released version of your package.
  • This is the x.y.z option, where x, y, and z are numbers for you package's most recent released version.

Now the question is, should you do a prerelease? The prerelease job does something that no other job does, it downloads, builds, and tests released packages which depend on your packages. This is really awesome if you are releasing a new version of a package which has already been released, but it is strictly less useful when you are releasing a package for the first time, since that means there are no released packages which can depend on you yet.

On the first release into a ROS distribution, I would recommend either just not doing a prerelease or doing the binary build test locally, see: http://wiki.ros.org/bloom/Tutorials/P...

For Jade we plan to roll out a new tool which allows you to do pre-releases locally and with more control. This should make it easier to debug pre-releases and faster to run them since you don't have to wait on our farm which gets pretty backed up on pre-releases.