ros-robot and ros-simulators-dev missing related packages

[Philip Brown]

I was pleasantly surprised to see packages such as "ros-core-dev", "ros-desktop-full-dev", etc. in the latest ubuntu 22 package set. However, almost everyone will want to use gazebo with it.
And, while there is a "gazebo" package.. there is no "ros-gazebo" package, which supplies the neccessary ros hooks.

A reminder that this sort of thing was supplied by ROS upstream for Ubuntu, by a package like
ros-noetic-ros-gz

Upstream has a "ros-noetic-ros-core", which you deliver as just "ros-core"
So there needs to be a similar "ros-gz" to match "ros-noetic-ros-gz"

There may also need to be a "xacro" package, to match "ros-noetic-xacro".

Oddly,

apt-cache search xacro

pulls up "ros-robot".
However, there does not seem to be any actual xacro dependancy that the metapackage pulls in

In a similar way,
apt-cache search gazebo
pulls up "ros-simulators-dev" .. but that meta package does not pull in the ros required extras either.

[Jochen Sprickerhof (v-launchpad-jochen-sprickerhof-de)]

As mentioned in the corresponding ROS discourse thread [1] these packages are originally from the Debian robotics team and we are happy to receive more helping hands to work on ROS in Debian. Feel free to reach out to us if you want to help: https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/RoboticsTeam.

Once the related packages are in Debian, we can also provide a meta package. Closing for now as this is not a bug in the package.

[1] https://discourse.ros.org/t/ros-and-ubuntu-22/33729

[Philip Brown (bolthole)]

I'm confused.
I specifically mentioned that
apt-cache search xacro
pulls up "ros-robot", when it does not provide or depend on xacro.
Also apt-cache search gazebo shows "ros-simulators"dev", when that package does not reference gazebo.
These are clear packaging errors. How can you say there is no bug here?

[Jochen Sprickerhof (v-launchpad-jochen-sprickerhof-de)]

apt show ros-robot gives:

Description: Python Robot OS robot metapackage
 This package is part of Robot OS (ROS). It is a metapackage which
 provides all the ROS robot system (including ROS base).
 .
 Different to upstream, this package does not provide:
 control_msgs, executive_smach, filters,
 xacro.
 Please install them from source, if you need them.

So it clearly describes the situation. What do you mean by packaging errors?