Interest in rosshow in ros2cli?

rosshow is a CLI for displaying ros messages in terminal, I think its a really neat tool and would be open to porting it to ROS2 for inclusion in the core ros2cli repo if the maintainers here find it valuable.

I’d take responsibility maintaining it, perhaps along with the original author @dheera

https://github.com/dheera/rosshow

[SteveMacenski]

I’ll close this ticket then and circle back in variants repo when I have something worth putting forward for eloquent and forward

[dirk-thomas]

The packages included in the “core” variant are neither defined by the inclusion into specific repositories not by the inclusion into the ros2.repos file. They are defined in REP 2001. So in order to include a package into “core” you should propose the addition there for future ROS distros. The lower level the variant is the higher the expectation on the maintainer will be to release the package promptly when new distributions are being bootstrapped.

Adding more and more packages into a single repo is a scalability problem: issues are mixed, maintainer roles are unclear, all packages share a version number and must be released together, etc.

The ros2.repos file is used by our monolithic CI on ci.ros2.org and currently to produce the binary archive for all platforms. But that is hopefully a short term thing since we really want to switch that to use rosinstall_generator. So I would say you should expect the ros2.repos file to go away at some point.

Why not list all the ros2cli packages in the ros2cli metapackage XML as exec_depends, then in the variant repo package.xml you can just list ros2cli and it will grab the rest?

The ros2cli package is not a metapackage. It contains the framework part of the command line tools and the main executable. So it can’t depend on the packages actually providing command since those are depending on ros2cli. In general we don’t use metapackages much morein ROS 2 - even the special package type doesn’t exist as a concept in ROS 2 (though you can achieve the same with an empty package which just has exec dependencies).