Release robot_localization into ROS Noetic?

[sloretz]

Would you mind releasing robot_localization to ROS Noetic? It looks like all of its dependencies have been released, and recursively 15 repos need it.

I'm not sure how much work it will need. The Noetic Migration Guide or the guide about transitioning ROS packages to Python 3 may be useful.

[SteveMacenski]

I can do this, shouldn’t be much effort. There’s an active question in #557 on if changing the install locations would break ABI that’s my only blocker as a fork in the road about direction to go.

[Timple]

The call for testing reveiled that this package was not yet released for noetic.
Now #557 is merged, would a release be in order?

[SteveMacenski]

@ayrton04 I went to release and I get a warning about potential items to address and patches on various branches. I haven't made use of the bloom patches capabilities (are those documented anywhere?) so that makes me wary to doing it myself since I'm not sure if I need to change anything. Can you release for noetic on melodic-devel?

[ayrton04]

I am happy to bloom it. As I recall, I had to bloom, then manually add an -O3 build flag somewhere in a release repo, and then bloom again. I'll sort it out early next week.

[ayrton04]

We may need to branch for noetic after all. This rosdep key doesn't exist for focal:

https://github.com/cra-ros-pkg/robot_localization/blob/melodic-devel/package.xml#L38

[Timple]

You can have conditional dependencies for package format 3. Which is available at least as of kinetic.

[ayrton04]

So I've not used the conditional dependencies before (clearly), but looking at the documentation, it looks like I need to be able to do this:

<build_depend condition="foo">python-catkin-pkg</build_depend>
<build_depend condition="bar">python3-catkin-pkg</build_depend>

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but what conditions would we use in this case? I need to know what the name of that dependency is for the platform on which we're building. The build farm builds for more than just Ubuntu, so I need a condition that will work across platforms. If they all have the same dependency name, then I can do this:

<build_depend condition="$ROS_DISTRO != noetic">python-catkin-pkg</build_depend>
<build_depend condition="$ROS_DISTRO == noetic">python3-catkin-pkg</build_depend>

^ That at least functions on focal. If it works on the other Noetic target platforms, then it should behave. I'll PR that change and see what the build farm says for melodic.

[SteveMacenski]

An example:
<exec_depend condition="$ROS_PYTHON_VERSION == 2">python-numpy</exec_depend>
<exec_depend condition="$ROS_PYTHON_VERSION == 3">python3-numpy</exec_depend>

[ayrton04]

Ah, that's a much better env var to use. Thanks.

[ayrton04]

ros/rosdistro#25297

Once that gets merged and the buildfarm picks this up and (hopefully) builds it, I'll close this.

[ayrton04]

This is now complete. Note that we're tracking a different issue with tf2, but I think the fix is on their end in this case.