Hello everyone,
I'm a technician/developer at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)[1],
and I'm working mostly on YARP (an open source middleware for
robotics)[2,3] and in general on the on the software developed in the
"robotology" GitHub organization[4] and running on the iCub[5] and R1[6]
robots.
I've been around Debian for a very long time, mostly as a user,
reporting random bugs and in a few cases helping with a couple of
packages. I'm also the maintainer of nifti2dicom[7] (which I haven't
really updated in the last few years, since I'm no longer working in the
neuroimaging field, but it is still working), and the former maintainer
of gtkdataboxmm[8] which is no longer in Debian repositories.
I was at the debian-science and debian-med BoFs at DebConf (drdanz),
since I'm interested in packaging and maintaining a few packages from
the "robotology" github organization (mostly developed here at IIT), and
perhaps helping with some other robotics-related packages.
I started working on a few of them but the YARP package turned out to be
a lot more complicated than what I was expecting (I actually opened the
original ITP in 2012, and I worked upstream little by little on fixing
the issues that I found while trying to create the package).
I now have a few working packages on an Ubuntu PPA[9], but I'm a bit
stuck because I could not find any sponsor, I have lots of questions,
and I'm still a bit confused by the Debian workflow.
Therefore I was wondering if there is someone that would be available
to mentor me through the process.
These are the related bugs that I opened so far:
* #682756: ITP: yarp -- middleware for humanoid robots
* #934757: ITP: ycm-cmake-modules -- Extra CMake Modules for YARP and
friends
* #966342: RFS: ycm-cmake-modules/0.11.3-1 [ITP] -- Extra CMake Modules
for YARP and friends
* #969037: ITP: robot-testing-framework -- Robot Testing Framework
I'm also looking for someone that would like to make a talk here at IIT
(unfortunately online, due to the coronavirus, but we can eventually try
to organize a visit later, when the pandemic is over), about
Debian Science, Debian in general, and eventually make a
small tutorial for beginners about how to start packaging.
We produce a lot of software and libraries, but unfortunately we tend to
build everything from sources on all our computers, therefore my goal is
to persuade the people working here that proper packaging could help a
lot our workflow.
By the way, in case you have never heard about them, iCub is an open
source (both hardware and software) humanoid robotic platform that we
produce mostly for research and R1 is a recent effort to produce a "low
cost" humanoid robot (unfortunately for this robot the hardware is not
open).
All the computers onboard and of the cluster connected to the robots run
either Debian or in same cases ubuntu, with a few exceptions for
computers running some specific software that runs only on windows,
and researcher laptops that run whatever operating system the researcher
chooses.
Thanks in advance to anyone who will reply and will help me with the
packaging.
Cheers,
Daniele
[1]https://www.iit.it/
[2]http://yarp.it/
[3]https://github.com/robotology/yarp/
[4]https://github.com/robotology
[5]https://icub.iit.it/
[6]https://icub.iit.it/products/r1-robot
[7]https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nifti2dicom
[8]https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gtkdataboxmm
[9]https://launchpad.net/~robotology/+archive/ubuntu/test/+packages
