Hi all:
I would like to ask what would the best approach to solve the following problem (specially interested in the opinions of my fellow ROS team members here: Jochen, Leo):
One of the robotics simulators, Gazebo version 11, is still supported upstream until 2025 but no longer releases new versions. We have it in Debian and it depends on different major versions of Ignition libraries (these libs are a refactor from the Gazebo code) and other physics libraries (like DART or Bullet).
Development upstream (Open Robotics) is now focused on the new ignition-gazebo simulator (considered like the sucesor of Gazebo) which depends on the whole Ignition family of libraries, some of them are the same libraries (like ignition-transport) than the ones used by Gazebo.
Problem is that both current versions of Gazebo and ignition-gazebo depend on different major versions of the ignition libraries (i.e gazebo11 used ign-transport8 and ignition-gazebo uses ign-transport11). Although upstream supports side by side installations of the Ignition family we have tried to have in Debian just one of them to make transitions easier and reduce the maintenance effort. I'm not sure if this problem can drive us to change our current practices.
Thanks!
P.D: disclaimer, I work for Open Robotics which is upstream of Ignition libraries and Gazebo.