Status of vcstool

[esteve]

I was just wondering what the status of this repo is. Is it still actively maintained? If not, @dirk-thomas would you be open to let other people maintain it? Given that vcstool is widely used in the ROS community, perhaps moving this repo to the @osrf or @ros organizations

[nuclearsandwich]

The ROS infrastructure team maintains vcstool in the ROS repositories. Since it has been meeting our infrastructure needs as is, we have not needed to update sources ourselves lately but if there's interest in setting up an organization to grow vcstool maintainers or transferring it to an existing organization we could assist with repository maintenance as well. It is worth bearing in mind, that our efforts would still be split among all of the packages in the ROS infrastructure pipeline.

[130s]

+1 for a more active maintenance team.

(In my company @aaronplusone's #219 is needed so we maintain our fork. We'd love to win-win in OSS for such contributions.)

[christophebedard]

Thanks @nuclearsandwich for following up here.

I'd also be willing to help maintain this.

[tdenewiler]

Can I get a maintainer to approve my PR to run Actions for #246? Thanks.

[nuclearsandwich]

I've opened a PR which gets CI back to operational with changes to python versions and flake8. I'll merge that PR into my own fork's default branch next week and port a few of the open PRs here to that fork for preliminary review. Please continue to open PRs on the main repository for the time being so that we can keep all the discussion in one place.

[asherikov]

Personally I prefer wstool workflow, so I implemented a basic replacement in bash with yq -> https://github.com/asherikov/wshandler, contributions are highly encouraged.

[130s]

There's even pypi package https://pypi.org/project/vcstool2/ that turns out to be released from a fork (which was not obvious to me for a while) https://github.com/MaxandreOgeret/vcstool2/issues/5 by @MaxandreOgeret.

[130s]

I posted discourse.ros.org#33661 solely aiming to raise an awareness of the maintenance status. There has been not an awful lot but some responses; 5 stars to the OP and continued discussions. I take that as arguably "there is enough interest".

My personal proposal is:

• Add maintainer(s) with write access so that PRs can be merged.
  • @christophebedard offered that in https://github.com/dirk-thomas/vcstool/issues/242#issuecomment-1168724748 :+1:
• (May need more thoughts) Move/Fork git repo to somewhere more common.
  • How about https://github.com/ros-infrastructure. As I mentioned in discourse.ros.org#33661, vcstool has nothing to with ROS dependency-wise, and there's no reason I can think of to be hosted under ROS* organization (I'm afraid giving wrong impression "vcstool is tied with ROS" would drive away potential users and contributors who are not interested in ROS). ros-infrastructure just historically makes sense (e.g. Some other ROS-agnostic tools such as rosdep (despite its name), bloom, catkin_pkg), and the link to ROS as a robotics framework is weaker than other "core" orgs IMO.
  • I also thought of https://github.com/ros-tooling but I'm not clear about the background of this org. By just looking at the repos hosted there, the functionality is more of "robotics framework", so may not be ideal as it could inadvertently give a wrong impression that "vcstool is robotics tool".
• Releasing installers (.deb, pip etc.): I guess we want to keep the same name of already released packages? If so, we need current release-maintainers help.

@nuclearsandwich Since you appear to have a write access to this repo, would you mind sharing your thoughts?