quilt vs native methods / release-less builds

[nicolov]

Hello, thanks for publishing this. I've watched the ROSCon talk and it was full of good ideas. I have a few doubts though:

• AFAICT, both the quilt and the native method have the same issue with unrelated catkin packages being pulled into the build when they share a repository with needed packages. Is that correct? If so, I can submit a PR to improve the readme.

• Regarding the problem above, couldn't we just use the cache to find all recursive dependencies of the "root" package, and generate a whitelist file accordingly? Am I missing something here?

• Have you made progress on the idea of builds without bloom/release repos? What's wrong with using the version: key in rosdistro to hold a githash instead of a branch?

Thanks

[nicolov]

I've found this and understand much more now: the cached package.xml apply to the release repo, not to the source repo. That's why you worked on caching the source manifest as well.

[mikepurvis]

Hi @nicolov, thanks for the kind words.

AFAICT, both the quilt and the native method have the same issue with unrelated catkin packages being pulled into the build when they share a repository with needed packages.

Yes, that is correct. Our internal version of this tooling (at Clearpath) computes the dependencies and passes an explicit whitelist as you suggested, but I wanted to keep the example given here simple and straightforward, particularly for an audience with varying exposure to these things.

Have you made progress on the idea of builds without bloom/release repos? What's wrong with using the version: key in rosdistro to hold a githash instead of a branch?

Yes, we now do exactly that in our internal version of this. There's some discussion of the particulars in ros-infrastructure/rosdistro#92. The main reason I don't draw a lot of attention to it in the ROSCon presentation is that source manifest caching never got turned on in the buildfarm due to the overhead of needing to git ls-remote all the repos on each cache rebuild (see the discussion here ros-infrastructure/rosdistro#84 (diff)).

If you're interested to move this forward, I would be delighted to see a PR on the rosdistro repo that would allow updating the source cache only once a day or something (or incrementally), so that it would be possible to have source repo packages available from the buildfarm.