* Jose Luis Rivero <jrivero@openrobotics.org> [2021-08-17 14:05]:
>ignition-gazebo is a rewrite of the good old Gazebo (Gazebo classic) which
>is designed to supersede it. Can be seen as a ROS 1 vs ROS 2 evolution
>since they share some important aspects like the break of compatibility
>with the antecesor. It is hard to say that the replacement is ready since
>it mostly varies with everyone's use case. There is a table that can help
>in this front:
>https://ignitionrobotics.org/docs/edifice/comparison
Thanks, looks like a lot of features are there while a bunch is still
missing. Not sure if it makes sense to update already, but I don't use
Gazebo currently so your call.
Your quick look I think is accurate.
>I have the feeling that there is a large community of people now using
>Gazebo that will take some time to migrate to ignition-gazebo for different
>reasons so my personal preference would be to be able to have both
>available in Debian during some time to give people time to plan the
>migration.
But are they bound to Gazebo or also to a specific ROS and Ubuntu
version?
Good question. The Gazebo user base mainly comes from people integrating it with ROS but there are some users of the simulation without integrating it in other frameworks. The good point of keeping Gazebo11 in Debian is that ROS and ROS2 integrate this version for current distributions and any other probably until the EOL of it. User can get it directly from Debian (all supported platforms and and all its derivatives) instead of dealing with other kinds of sources.
>> So my view here would be to upload ignition-gazebo once it is ready and
>> then see if supporting the old version makes sense.
>>
>>
>I agree. Problem here is that if we upgrade some of the ignition libraries
>to new major versions, Gazebo classic has never been tested to compile or
>work with the new major versions so it is unknown if the new mix would work
>in the same or compatible way with previous mix of Gazebo + supported
>Ignition libs major versions.
Yeah, I mean gazebo plus libraries in the corresponding version. Having
multiple versions of software in Debian for a transition period seems
quiet normal.
Thanks, that seems to me the most reasonable approach for the whole problem.
A possible migration plan inside Debian could be:
In experimental:
1. Rename the needed parts (source package, -deb package, ...) of current ignition libraries used by Gazebo11 that are not compatible with ignition-gazebo latest.
2. Change gazebo11 to use these new package names.
3. Introduce latest major versions of Ignition libraries in renamed in 1 with the current approach of naming them to be the default ones (mainly standard -dev package name).
4. Move the whole set of things (all ignition libraries) from experimental to unstable at once to facilitate ignition libraries transition to the latest for the user not in Gazebo.
Does this seem reasonable?
Thanks Jochen for the help.