Where to find info/changelogs of ROS package releases

asked 2018-05-17 03:27:10 -0500

stfn
287 ●10 ●19 ●24

I'm on Ubuntu 16.04 and get updates of ros-packages from time to time via apt(-get). One can observe that they're released in "bursts", so a group of packages are released together. Everytime I update the packages, I wonder what the actual changes are and how they affect my projects, but I have no clue where to look it up. Of course, I could search github for each package, find out the package version (not to mix up with the release version!) and look into the changelog, but this seems very cumbersome. Isn't there a unified Changelog for those burst-releases?

answered 2018-05-17 03:34:32 -0500

gvdhoorn
86574 ●283 ●1432 ●1054 http://cor.tudelft.nl/

updated 2018-05-17 03:50:00 -0500

Isn't there a unified Changelog for those burst-releases?

No, unfortunately not.

It would also not be trivial to do that, as packages are (mostly) developed in relative isolation, so it would take additional effort to create such a unified changelog.

Coalescing changelogs could be done however by a job on the buildfarm fi, but that is currently not something that exists.

Edit:

One can observe that they're released in "bursts", so a group of packages are released together.

just to clarify: the packages are only synced in aggregation, they are not released together. Package maintainers are free to release their packages at any time, but those newer versions will not appear in the public/main repository until they are moved there from the staging one.

See ShadowRepository for some background on this process.

Edit2:

Of course, I could search github for each package, find out the package version (not to mix up with the release version!) and look into the changelog, but this seems very cumbersome.

just in case you didn't know: package wiki pages for released packages have a link to the changelog as well. That might be more efficient than trawling github repositories.

It's in the Package Links box on the right side of the page:

image description

The one for roscpp is here fi.

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Comments

Thanks for the detailed answer. Is there a single source summarizing the package version bumps that were (or are going to be) released? Then one could parse this one and aggregate the changelog data somehow.

stfn ( 2018-05-17 03:54:52 -0500 )edit

I think @tfoote has scripts for that which he uses to generate content for the syncs he announces on ROS Discourse periodically.