rqt_dep: display package info from different distro?

[scpeters]

We are approaching releasing season for ROS K, and a common question is which packages are blocking the release of other packages. The rqt_dep tool is great for visualizing package dependencies. It would be great if we could use this tool to visualize which packages have been released into a new ROS distro, to identify the blockages.

In discussing this in the past, a known complicating factor is that dependencies may change from one ROS distro to the next, so this can be an ill-posed problem in some cases.

Most of the time, though, the dependencies don't change from one distro to the next. As a first step, I would load rqt_dep with the most recently released ROS distro (jade at the moment) and would like to select another distro from a drop-down combo-box and then colorize the graph.

Any hints are welcome.

[dirk-thomas]

That sound's like an interesting extension. Currently rqt_dep only queries the state of the packages on the system using rospkg. The feature you describe would need to use rosdistro to have access to packages not on the system as well as other distributions.

It would be great if you could work on extending this plugin or creating a new plugin which uses rosdistro for this purpose.

[wjwwood]

I think that rqt_dep only operates on what packages you have locally. So, you need to have all of the packages in Indigo installed to get rqt_dep to see them. So the first thing you'd want to do is make rqt_dep or a new tool like rqt_dep able to pull information from the rosdistro cache. This is a file that our build farm generates very frequently which contains all the released packages for a distribution. It also includes the package.xml files for each of those released packages. This is how the script that generates the wiki page works:

https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/ros.org_scripts/blob/master/wiki.ros.org/jade_metapackage_status.py

So it would be a marriage of the above script's data access and rqt_dep's graph visualization logic.

[scpeters]

Thanks, that should be enough to get started.

[dirk-thomas]

This issue was moved to ros-visualization/rqt_dep#2