packaging ROS bfl

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

I intend to package ROS bfl but have several questions for the ROS people among
you.

ROS bfl (http://wiki.ros.org/bfl) seems to be a copy of orocos bfl
(http://www.orocos.org/bfl). Not only does ROS distribute an outdated version
(0.7.0 versus 0.8.0) but using the ROS library is also different from using the
actual upstream library. In ROS you say:

pkg_check_modules(BFL REQUIRED bfl)

while for the upstream project you say:

pkg_check_modules(BFL REQUIRED orocos-bfl)

Intuitively, I'd rather package the actual upstream package instead of the ROS
version but there are several issues with that:

 - ROS packages will require the library named bfl and not orocos-bfl
 - ROS packages might require version 0.7.0 instead of 0.8.0
 - and I don't see a way to easily find out how many reverse dependencies ROS
   bfl actually has, so how many packages would be potentially affected
 - the actual upstream might be dead (seven commits in the past five years)
   while ROS bfl might continue to be maintained by ROS (but I don't know that
   for sure either)

Funnily, the science-robotics meta package Suggests orocos-bfl even though that
package is not in Debian.

Thanks!

cheers, josch
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