Consider porting merge-repos.rb to remove Ruby dependency

[Bckempa]

Moving the merge-repos.rb script to shell or python would reduce the number of system dependencies required to build space-ros

[EzraBrooks]

Personally, pro-Python. shell scripts are slightly more portable but way harder to write good/safe code in. Anywhere that we introduce Python code, though, we should introduce a sane linter configuration.

[Bckempa]

Personally, pro-Python. shell scripts are slightly more portable but way harder to write good/safe code in. Anywhere that we introduce Python code, though, we should introduce a sane linter configuration.

I try not to add Python as a dependency to things just to avoid writing proper shell scripts but since it is expected by other ROS tooling I agree it would be fine.

[EzraBrooks]

Is there any Linux distro that doesn't include Python? half of them use Python in things like.. their package manager.

[Bckempa]

In my pervious work it's been more about avoiding XKCD Python Environment situations, especially when every [bistro][autocorrect for distro, but I'm leaving it] was in a different phase of the Python 2 to 3 migration using different naming and pathing, etc. on top of supporting people running whatever ancient version of Red Hat they had a license for.

But I agree that Space ROS targets such a narrowly defined and modern platform configuration that none of that caution applies here.