Robotics simulation package (orocos?, stage?)

Tue Sep 3 12:15:59 UTC 2013

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 4:11 AM, Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sun, Jun 02, 2013 at 08:35:04PM +0200, Anton Gladky wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>>
>> On 06/02/2013 09:56 AM, Parménides GV wrote:
>> > Hello to everybody,
>> >
>> >  I saw using "aptitude show science-robotics" that the recommended
>> > package for robotics simulation is robot-player. I installed it, and I
>> > was surprised that the man doc date is May 2009!!! I've also seen that
>> > the project has been moved to github, and that it even got renamed to
>> > "Stage". Can anybody package this new project?
>>
>> You can contact to a maintainer of this package [1] and ask him about
>> that or (better) help him to do this work. The package does not belong
>> to debian-science team, actually.
>
> It might even be that the maintainer Michael Janssen is not even aware
> that there is a Debian Science Blend team that tries to assemble
> packages with relevance for different sciences in so called tasks.
> Michael, could you confirm that you are aware of the work of Debian
> Science?  Are you possibly interested to join this effort and move your
> package into VCS as described in Debian Science policy[2]?  You might
> also like to read how to contribute to Debian Science in the Wiki[3].
>
> Regarding the original question from Parménides: The most
> straightforward way to notify the author about new upstream versions is
> to file a wishlist bug using `reportbug` against the package with
> subject "New version available" and provide the information about the
> new location and name. as you did above.
>
>> >  On the other side, I've seen that "orocos" packages are in the
>> > recommended section from science-robotics. They are not present in
>> > Debian repositories!!! What happens with this? Why is it "recommended"
>> > even if I cannot download it from repositories? I've seen
>> > http://blends.alioth.debian.org/science/tasks/robotics.ru.html and I
>> > understand we may not have time to fix that, but my worry is that I did
>> > a Google search in this mailing list archives and I didn't get *any*
>> > result containing the word "orocos". Why is this possible? I thought I
>> > would see somebody who was willing, at least in the far past, to upload
>> > an orocos package to Debian official repositories, so that if I were
>> > interested in continuing that job I could start in some point different
>> > from scratch.
>>
>> The package should have somebody, who is interested to maintain the
>> package. Otherwise the package is not be able to exist in Debian. If you
>> ()or somebody else) prepare the orocos-package ready to be uploaded into
>> the official archive, it gets the chance to be sponsored into the main
>> repository.
>
> +1
>
> Debian is a DoOcracy so the doer decides what gets done.  If you are
> really interested in doing something we could teach you how to package
> and help you crawling the first hurdles.
>
>> >  Another thing I would like to know, different from these two issues, is
>> > if there is any irc room anywhere for this Debian Science group.
>>
>> #debian-science on irc.debian.org
>>
>> But I think, that the serious topics should be discussed on mailing list.
>
> +1
>
>> >  Thanks for all your job, and sorry if I was a bit hard with my words.
>> > I've never written to a mailing list, but I'm sure this won't be the
>> > last time ;)
>>
>> Please, do not forget, that Debian is a voluntary project and as any
>> other similar project lacks manpower.
>
> Kind regards
>
>        Andreas.
>
>> [1] http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=jamuraa@debian.org
>
> [2] http://debian-science.alioth.debian.org/debian-science-policy.html
> [3] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianScience/ContributingToDebianScience

This thread has sat in my inbox for far too long at this point but I
hope I can still add something to this discussion.  I looked in the
archive[1] and couldn't find the thread though so if something is
repeated, please bear with me.

I was aware of debian-science in general but not the Blend teams or
the specific robotics based blend.

Some clarification if it hasn't been done already:
Player is at version 3.0.2 now, the last stable release has been
packaged for Debian and been in the archive for a while now.  It's
still used in many labs for controlling robots, as indicated by a
recent article in IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine [2].  It's
technically under active development but is moving into more of a
maintenance phase which is indicated in the article (unfortunately
behind a paywall).
Stage is a simulator for robotics which can be used independently or
in combination with a robot middleware framework.  Player is very
common to use with Stage since they were developed concurrently by the
same team - usually its called Player/Stage when used this way.  I've
also packaged stage in the past, but it got quite out of date and I
didn't have time to update it, so it got removed from the archive a
while ago.  It's currently still under development.

I've stopped using Player as part of my day-to-day robotics work,
having my development move on to the ROS middleware[3] which I would
love to get into Debian but is quite the moving target nowadays and a
bit complicated, I could discuss that at length if people are
interested.  I don't think that the player package is out of date
though.  The stage package definitely needs to be updated and
uploaded.  I would be happy to join with Debian Science and move the
packaging that I currently have to the VCS.  I already use git and the
upstream/pristine-tar/etc branches that are recommended so it should
not be hard.  I also have the partially-done stage 4.0 packaging which
shouldn't be too hard to update to 4.1.1 and get back into Debian
again, I can focus on that for a couple hours this week.

[1]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-science/2013/06/
[2]: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6544562
[3]: http://ros.org

Michael Janssen --- Jamuraa --- jamuraa at base0.net --- jamuraa at debian.org