Public bug reported: Currently there is a duplication of ROS packages in Ubuntu between the official upstream packages and the ones coming from Debian Science.
Background: ROS Upstream developers/maintainers OSRF (Open Source Robotics Foundation) have been providing deb packages for Ubuntu from their PPA since the initial releases of ROS more than 10 years ago. They encourage users to follow the official upstream installation process of ROS by adding their own PPA. See for example the installation instructions and some forum pages: https://docs.ros.org/en/ros2_documentation/iron/Installation.html https://gazebosim.org/api/gazebo/6.1/install.html A subset of ROS packages have been repackaged and slightly renamed by the ROS Debian Science maintainers, those were intended to be used in Debian since upstream does not provide ROS debs for Debian. Ubuntu Archive indirectly imports those packages from Debian. A user following the official installation instructions will end up with two sets of packages with not enough differences in their names to understand what is happening: quite some internal knowledge about debs and PPAs and our archive is needed to be able to figure out the issue. Some examples over the years: - A user thinks they come from Canonical directly: https://discourse.ros.org/t/canonical-built-ros-packages/4316 - A collection of questions from ROS users in answers.ros.org (similar to stackoverflow for ROS) related to errors because of these packages: https://discourse.ros.org/t/upstream-packages-increasingly-becoming-a-problem/10902 - Users still complaining in the most recent version and again thinking the packages come from Canonical: https://discourse.ros.org/t/ros-and-ubuntu-22/33729 Note that users encounter errors while trying to install ROS from the official installation after polluting their Ubuntu with the packages coming from Debian Science. Changes agreed with OSRF: Removing the ROS Debian packages from Ubuntu will reduce the confusion of ROS ownership between Canonical-Ubuntu and OSRF and will also directly remove the errors during installation, increasing the usability of ROS in Ubuntu. The list of packages to remove is composed by the following roots and all their recursive dependents. https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ros2-rcutils https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ros-catkin https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ros-roscpp-core https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ignition-math https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ignition-cmake https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ros-std-msgs https://packages.ubuntu.com/source/noble/ros2-ament-package The list may grow in the future if Debian imports more "root" packages from OSRF. ** Affects: ros-catkin (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Attachment added: "drawing of to-be-removed source packages and dependencies" https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2063103/+attachment/5769380/+files/deps.png -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2063103 Title: Remove ROS duplicated packages imported from Debian To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ros-catkin/+bug/2063103/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
