package.xml: use 'replace' tag for non-ROS package

edit

I believe that ros-kinetic- prefix is added there by the rosdebian generator in Bloom. I'm not sure it can be removed.

Perhaps @William can add something here.

REP 127 does say this though (here):

Declares a rosdep key or ROS package name that your package replaces

"rosdep key" could only mean "system dependency" (ie: non-ROS pkg), so it would seem this should work.

Is bar a ROS pkg?

@gvdhoorn , in this example, bar need not be a ROS package. It's better (for my use case, at least) if bar is _not_ a ROS package. This would allow me to <replace> arbitrary packages by name and not just the proper subset of packages known to rosdep.

Hm.

I can think of one reason why we would not want to do/support/allow this (but this is just me speculating): if arbitrary pkgs could be replaced that way, I would create a "rogue" package.xml, release it and replace any arbitrary pkg on a system. That wouldn't be very nice.

...unless, of course, that was the desired behavior. Any person (or software tool) capable of creating and/or editing a debian/control file can effect package removal. Maintainers and system administrators are responsible for package hygiene and installation, respectively.

In principle I agree. But we have to remember that releasing a ROS pkg and getting it distributed through the package repositories to thousands of user's machines is way easier than getting something into Debian/Ubuntu -- which have stricter quality control mechanisms.

But again: it was just me speculating.

What you've observed could just be a bug in the generator.

Submitted issue asking for clarification: https://github.com/ros-infrastructure...