Your Own GitHub Builder for ROS-O deb Packages

This repository builds an extended ROS ecosystem for Debian-based distributions in ros-one-*.deb packages on GitHub's free GitHub Action.

Target Distribution: At the moment packages are build for Debian sid and Ubuntu 22.04 jammy. Other Debian-based target distributions can be setup as well.

Build Time: Build times vary on the amount of packages selected. An extended system of around 1000 packages takes around 13 hours to build using the provided parallelized build jobs.

Usage

You can either rely on this repository, e.g., jammy-one, or fork it to control package versions, target distribution, and syncs yourself.

Setup instructions for your own fork

Step 1: Fork this repository.

Step 2: Adjust Permissions. To push built debs in this repository yourself, you need to change github's default permissions for the actions of your forked repository.

Step 3: Revise on.scheduled: triggers in each build-for-<distro> branches .github/workflows/build.yaml to only build when necessary.

Step 4 [optional]: Navigate to Settings -> Pages -> Deploy from a branch and select the <distro>-one or <distro>-one-unstable branch to deploy a clean github page based on the generated README.md.

Branch Overview

build-for-<distro> contains the github workflow configurations in .github, e.g., jammy-one/.github, the sources.repos file specifying all repositories to be built, and custom rosdep.yaml mapping for the target distribution.
<distro>-one-unstable contains the generated results of each individual action run (either manually triggered or scheduled)
<distro>-one contains a snapshot of <distro>-one-unstable that can be updated (or synced) by the user using the provided sync-unstable action workflow with the respective <distro>-one-unstable branch.

How to Add Packages

sources.repos contains the list of repositories to build. To add additional packages, you simply need to add new entries to this file. Still, to avoid problems during integration, it is recommended to follow these steps:

Step 1: Setup a ros-o-overlay fork and build the packages there.

Step 2: Fix potential build issues in the overlay (as package builds in the main builder take much longer).

Step 3: Propose a pull-request to add the sources.repos entries in this repository (or your fork). Notice that this is not a fully-featured rosdistro/build farm replacement.

Compatibility with OpenRobotics' ROS2 packages

The packages built here rely on Debian packages of ROS core infrastructure [0, 1]. For multiple reasons -partly technical, partly political- these packages are not compatible with OpenRobotics' ROS2 packages which build very similar packages themselves in incompatible ways. It is possible to set up a builder based on individual OpenRobotics' deb repositories though.

TODOs

Explicitly Planned Packages to Add

Target Platforms

Ubuntu noble

Internals

optionally only build packages and downstream when they have changed upstream since the last build Debian sid needs to be rebuild in full every time, but stable distributions keep API/ABI compatibility.
record build times
- use them in task-to-worker assignment
ensure sources.repos contains at most N stages (as provided by the build.yaml)
constraint solver for graph partitioning by packages/build times
- likely still map to the same staged workers for predictable GH caching
reduce network load by caching debs
- set up https://launchpad.net/squid-deb-proxy
- or investigate whether a development version of deb-cacher-ng resolves sporadic 503 errors